Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage 9780814738252

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Walking Where Jesus Walked

North American Religions Series Editors: Tracy Fessenden (Religious Studies, Arizona State University), Laura Levitt (Religious Studies, Temple University), and David Harrington Watt (History, Temple University) In recent years a cadre of industrious, imaginative, and theoretically sophisticated scholars of religion have focused their attention on North America. As a result the field is far more subtle, expansive, and interdisciplinary than it was just two decades ago. The North American Religions series builds on this transformative momentum. Books in the series move among the discourses of ethnography, cultural analysis, and historical study to shed new light on a wide range of religious experiences, practices, and institutions. They explore topics such as lived religion, popular religious movements, religion and social power, religion and cultural reproduction, and the relationship between secular and religious institutions and practices. The series focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on religion in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards Ava Chamberlain Crossing the Water and Keeping the Faith: Haitian Religion in Miami Terry Rey and Alex Stepick Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature Jodi Eichler-Levine

Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism Isaac Weiner Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage Hillary Kaell

Walking Where Jesus Walked American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage

Hillary Kaell

a NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York and London

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2014 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. ISBN: 978-0-8147-3836-8 (hardcover) ISBN: 978-1-4798-3184-5 (paperback) For Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data, please contact the Library of Congress. New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

I walked today where Jesus walked In days of long ago. I wandered down each path He knew, With reverent step and slow. Those little lanes, they have not changed, A sweet peace fills the air. American Christian hymn

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Contents

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List of Figures

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Acknowledgments and Methodology

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Introduction

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Knowing the Holy Land: Sunday School Lessons and the Six O’Clock News

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Soul Searching: Why Grandparents Go Abroad

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Feeling the Gospel: Evangelicals, Place, and Presence

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The Middle Generation: Catholics, Scripture, and Tradition

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God and Mammon, God and Caesar: Commerce and Politics in the Holy Land 122

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The Long Voyage Home: Transformation and Rituals of Return

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Conclusion

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Author

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Figures

1.1 The Jordan River as depicted in a baptistery painting in a North Carolina Baptist church

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1.2 Photograph of the Jordan River today

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1.3 Evangelist Paul Radar at the Garden Tomb, reproduced in 1930

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1.4 Moody Monthly correspondent William Orr at the Garden Tomb in 1960

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1.5 Evangelical pilgrims at the Garden Tomb in 2007

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1.6 Israelis as depicted in Columbia magazine in 1961

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1.7 Arabs as depicted in Columbia magazine in 1961

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5.1 Exterior view of St. Mary’s Basilica, Phoenix, Arizona

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5.2 Interior view of St. Mary’s Basilica, Phoenix, Arizona

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5.3 Exterior view of St. Timothy Catholic Church, Mesa, Arizona

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5.4 Interior view of St. Timothy Catholic Church, Mesa, Arizona 136 6.1 Souvenir booklet from a pilgrim’s 1966 trip

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6.2 A “memory shrine” including souvenirs from a Protestant pilgrim’s trip

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6.3 Detail of “memory shrine”

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6.4 Holy Land souvenirs displayed with family photos in a Protestant pilgrim’s home

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6.5 Detail of household display of Holy Land souvenirs

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6.6 Holy Land souvenirs in Catholic pilgrims’ home

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6.7 Olive-wood souvenir from the Holy Land in Protestant pilgrims’ home

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6.8 Nephews of Bishop Fulton Sheen display souvenirs from a 1961 trip to the Holy Land

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Acknowledgments and Methodology

This book is about global travel and life-cycle transitions, about a lucrative leisure industry and trends in contemporary U.S. Christianity. Fundamentally, though, it is about relationships—with family and friends, with heavenly beings, and with people encountered abroad. It is appropriate, then, that I begin by acknowledging some of the relationships that have sustained me and made this book possible. Because acknowledgements are inevitably a record of how a project is crafted, it is also an opportunity to clarify my approach. I was trained in history, began this project as a student in American Studies, and finished it as a faculty member in Religious Studies. I situate my discussion in cultural anthropology, especially in the subfield of pilgrimage studies. I also draw on work in American “lived religion,” a methodology first articulated in the mid-1990s that uses historical, anthropological, and sociological models to explore “the creative working of real men and women.”1 While I have found it at times challenging to speak across disciplinary lines, the resulting discussions have greatly enriched my own thinking. I hope they will do the same for readers of this book. My research began in archives. I am indebted to the staff at the Billy Graham Center, the Catholic University of America, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Harvard University, the Moody Bible Institute, and Mount St. Sepulchre Franciscan Monastery. The Southern Baptist Historical Archives awarded me a grant, for which I am grateful. I also conducted forty-six interviews with tour professionals and exchanged e-mails with many more. They shared insights and personal archival material and/or were whizzes of logistical organization. In particular, I thank Hani Abu Dayyeh, Andrea Anastasato, Pano Anastasato Jr., Patricia Broderick Callan, Sheila Coleman, Dick and Jean Damisch, Kathy Dehoney-Evitts, Dr. Charles Dyer, Anton Farah, Bob Faucett, Christy Fay, Eliesa Gallo, David Gotaas Jr., Liz Grinder, Father Daniel Harrington, Sharon Hunter, Father Eamon Kelly, Itai Lavee, Dr. Walter McCord, Dale Nystrom, Jeannie Presley, Wanda Webber Snyder, Kathy Swartz, Bob Terrell, Dr. Michael Vanlaningham, Father David Wathen, Enid Yopp, and Father Peter Vasko. >>

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offered his characteristic and unflagging support, as did K. Healan Gaston toward the end of my time at graduate school and since then. I am grateful to everyone else in the North American Religions Colloquium, many of whom are now also friends. These include Eliza Young Barstow, Brandon Bayne, David Charles, Heather Curtis, Lin Fisher, Katie Gerbner, Rachel Gordon, Brett Grainger, Elizabeth Jemison, Dan McKanan, David Mislin, Max Mueller, Eva Payne, Kip Richardson, Jon Roberts, Stephen Shoemaker, David Grant Smith, and the late Jim Reed. Val Hellstein and Katherine Stevens were wonderful conversation partners as I worked through the ideas here and, importantly, made graduate school much more fun. Finally, I cannot thank my PhD advisors enough. Bob Orsi’s work brought me to grad school and continues to inspire. At critical junctures, he has posed penetrating questions and offered sound advice. R. Marie Griffith and Leigh Eric Schmidt graciously stepped in to shepherd the project to completion. Leigh helped me see the bigger picture and Marie read my work with an eagle eye. It is thanks to her that I matured as an ethnographer. Ann Braude has been a tireless cheerleader, editor, and proofreader; the journey would have been lonely without her. Last, I am grateful to Simon Coleman, who not only agreed to act as an outside reader but has made time to meet up for coffee ever since. In hundreds of little ways my family has made this whole journey possible: Mum (who patiently copyedited the manuscript), Dad, Rebecca, and Daniel; my “family-in-law,” Frieda, Danny, and Rebecca; and most of all Jesse—my very “favourite” travel companion. This book is dedicated to my mother, who taught me how to listen and to tell a story, and to Grandma Evelyn, who, more than anyone I know, enjoys the art of conversation.

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Introduction

Dale and I are waiting for the quiche to cool. It’s her culinary specialty, brags her husband Glen laughingly. In front of me is a display on a shelf near the stove: small olive wood carvings, a miniature jug of water, a set of glass salt and pepper shakers filled with more water and sand—Holy Land souvenirs from Dale’s recent trip. She turns on the CD of Christian hymns and Israeli-style melodies that she bought after their guide played it on the bus. Music fills the small bungalow and the two dogs start barking. Though normally subdued, Dale speaks excitedly for a moment, “The dogs love it and so does Glen. I play it all the time in the car and close my eyes and you feel—you’re there.” Dale is sixty-four years old and has been an evangelical Christian for more than thirty years.1 She was born the youngest of seven children in a poor Franco-American family in upstate New York. They were devoutly Catholic, but as Dale recalls it now, she always felt out of place. “I hated shrines. It was just—I always felt that we weren’t praying to the right thing. . . . I was the one who was a rebel. If there was something this way, I had to do it that way. It could never just be the same as they did it.” She married in her early twenties and had two daughters before the marriage fell apart. In the midst of her divorce, a friend invited her to what Dale calls a “Bible-teaching church.” She immediately felt at home; it seemed like God was guiding her to make a change. Years later, Dale met Glen through church and remarried. Today they live in a crowded, homey bungalow in a small town close to Burlington, Vermont, near her two adult daughters and grandchildren. Other than trips to Quebec and one to Mexico, Dale had never left the United States before going to the Holy Land. Nor had she had any inclination to do so. Exotic places don’t interest her and international travel is expensive. But when her pastor organized a group to see >>

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tourism, now the world’s single largest industry, and it is one facet of a multibillion-dollar Christian leisure industry that is today integral to how Americans practice their faith.3 Yet like Dale, prospective pilgrims invariably describe their motivations as rooted in Christian pasts—a historical past when Jesus walked on earth—and a personal past, when they first encountered the biblical stories that mean so much to them today. They undertake the pilgrimage as a self-conscious return to the “source” of their faith, physically and imaginatively. This book takes what might be seen as the contradictory nature of this experience and makes it central: what does it mean to return to the source, to “walk where Jesus walked,” in the context of twenty-firstcentury American Christianity? For pilgrims, the Holy Land trip is an especially rich field of encounter and imaginative production precisely because it is both a return to the past and a projection into the future: it expands their access to the global flows—economic, cultural, touristic, cosmological—that characterize the person they believe they are and can become.4 That it is a trip abroad is therefore by no means incidental. However, underlying my approach is the recognition that the experience of pilgrimage extends before and after the trip itself. It is embedded in pilgrims’ everyday lives. This book’s orientation therefore differs from most other work on modern pilgrimage; it is the first in-depth study of contemporary American Holy Land pilgrimage and, more broadly, the first major study of Christian pilgrimage that tracks how participants prepare for the trip and remember it upon return.5 As a result, this book offers a new perspective on what Holy Land trips mean to the people who undertake them. For tour producers and local actors—Christian ministries, Palestinians, and Israelis—American visitors are crucial because they spend millions of valuable dollars and are citizens of the foreign country most implicated in the regional balance of power. Attuned to these dynamics, scholars have examined how tourism plays a role in Israeli-Palestinian politics and have analyzed how relations are forged between Israeli tour producers (Jewish guides, the Ministry of Tourism) and Christian tour leaders (evangelical pastors and televangelists). This body of work offers detailed accounts of evangelical Christian Zionism and the international political alliances that result.6 Yet the foot soldiers of this profitable travel industry, American pilgrims themselves, are by no means typical “global citizens.” Unlike the

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too far beyond the bounds of local and denominational religious networks. Ultimately, I argue that the pilgrimage is spiritually powerful precisely because of the juxtaposition of religion with commercialism, tourism, and global experience. This tension heightens participants’ engagement with, and sometimes anxiety about, certain defining characteristics of Christian modernity along the lines outlined above. Consciously undertaking to “walk where Jesus walked” raises existential dilemmas provoked by comparing the present with an idealized Christian past. Going abroad makes pilgrims take stock of who they are at home. Encountering others elicits questions about religious pluralism and America’s role in the world. In short, by going to the Holy Land, pilgrims grapple with what it means to be a Christian in the United States today. If the trip is a success, the pilgrim reaffirms and strengthens her own relationship with God while also enacting it for others.

Who Goes and Why: Holy Land Pilgrimage in Its American Context Christians have traveled to the Holy Land since at least the fourth century. In Western Christendom, the practice peaked in the medieval period and then declined, sharply so in the early seventeenth century. Two hundred years later, Europeans revived the tradition and Americans followed suit. The first trans-Atlantic adventurers and missionaries arrived in Jerusalem in the 1820s.8 The group pilgrimage, as it is undertaken today, is a somewhat later development, and since I have described it as a product of modernity, it is useful to give a brief account of how it developed and to whom it appeals. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the United States underwent a major shift from an agrarian, craft-based economy to a more urban, industrialized one. This led to the growth of a new middle class and to the compartmentalization of time into separate periods for work and leisure. One result was the development of an industry that produced, packaged, and sold play. Middle-class tourism was part of this trend. In the 1840s, companies began to sell bulk tour tickets and arrange group travel in advance. Thomas Cook, a Baptist minister in England, is credited as the progenitor of the mass tour; by the 1860s, he had expanded internationally, with packaged trips to the Holy Land and Egypt.9

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either. By the early 1960s, 24.8 percent came from the Midwest, 24.4 percent came from the West, and most lived in small towns.15 While these new markets opened up among Protestants, American Catholics also began to make the trip in greater numbers. Catholics were less well established economically in the Gilded Age, and very few of them took part in the initial burst of tourism to Palestine. But the American Church had been growing rapidly, and with rising numbers came institution building. In 1880, the Franciscans, the Vatican’s Holy Land custodians since the fourteenth century, established a U.S. commissariat. As elsewhere, this branch of the order was tasked with collecting alms for the upkeep of the Catholic Holy Places and promoting an awareness of the Holy Land among laypeople. To this end, in 1889, the Commissariat ran the first American Catholic pilgrimage, a trip marketed to (and made possible by) a thriving American-born, urban middle class.16 Since the 1950s, Catholics have consistently accounted for at least a quarter of American Christian Holy Land visitors. In 2011, while I was doing research for this book, evangelicals made up 35 percent and Catholics 25 percent of this market, about commensurate with their respective populations in the United States. Globally, Catholics make up more than half of all Christian Holy Land visitors.17 I emphasize this point because while scholars have produced numerous studies of American Protestant Holy Land travel, next to nothing has been written about Catholics.18 I include both groups here in order to address this lacuna but also because the Holy Land affords a unique field of comparison: it is the one place where American Catholics and Protestants encounter each other at worship in religious sites that both claim are equally theirs. Catholic or Protestant, all American Holy Land pilgrimages since the mid-1950s share one major demographic trait: women comprise almost three-quarters of the average group. This gender imbalance is obscured in industry-produced brochures, on Internet sites, and in other media. Tour providers rarely mention it directly: some seem not to notice, and others see it as bad for business (“Men won’t go if they think it’s a bunch of ladies”). However, it is a remarkable trend when viewed historically. A hundred years ago a woman like Dale never could have traveled to the Holy Land. Fifty years before that, the thought would likely never have crossed her mind.

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responded by developing elaborate “activities programming,” including the occasional trip to the Holy Land. This market attracted a growing network of small family- and clergy-run tour businesses that were scattered across the country from Buena Park, California, to Milan, Pennsylvania. Interested travelers heard about trips through word of mouth, from the pulpit, on the radio and TV, or in local classified ads in newspapers: “See the Holy Land in 1955—6 weeks tour. . . . Write to Box 3-M, Wilmore, Kentucky.”22 Pilgrimage also made sense to prospective participants in the context of small groups, an organizational model that has developed especially since the mid-1960s and is now represented in most American churches. Though Catholics and evangelical Protestants have responded to divergent historical trends, in both cases small groups appeal because they allow individuals to tailor personal religious commitments beyond traditional church structures without having to abandon them altogether. Because barriers to entry are low, participants can choose to affiliate with a small group for short periods that suit their spiritual development.23 Holy Land pilgrimages operate in analogous ways and appeal for similar reasons: pilgrims pay for a short-term experience that enhances their spiritual lives, supplementing their regular church services and activities. Framing the pilgrimage in the context of religious leisure and “extracurricular” church activities evokes a second demographic fact: nearly all American pilgrims are fifty-five to seventy-five years old, a life stage that I call “middle-old” in this book.24 This life-cycle stage, sociologists point out, evolved over the twentieth century as modern medicine extended life far beyond what was thought possible a hundred years ago, stretching out “old age” for two or three decades. Concurrently, as modern industrialization made production more efficient, Western countries instituted mandatory retirement ages to keep younger populations employed. Thus, a life stage emerged where people were in better health than ever before, were no longer deemed necessary workers, and often collected a pension, a form of deferred wages or tax-funded payments. The first old-age pensions in the United States date to 1940.25 Two attributes of this middle-old stage are noteworthy. First, it is a “high point” of the life cycle for religiosity, and often levels of church activity increase significantly.26 And second, in the postindustrial West,

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sliding scales from “sacred” to “secular.” And, while some question the usefulness of binary distinctions, others, borrowing from tourism studies, are still apt to define packaged pilgrimages, like the ones I describe here, as “staged,” “McDonaldization,” “profaning,” or “Disneyization.”30 Since the mid-1990s, scholars of American lived religion have deconstructed these lines between sacred and profane, “high” and mass-produced art, religion and commerce. Studies in this field, mine included, treat commodities as fully embedded in religious worlds: American Christians consume to express and even constitute religiosity.31 From this perspective, the challenge for scholars is to explore how Americans integrate consumption into religious practice—the growth of a Holy Land tour industry, for example—while also recognizing that the profane/ sacred divide may retain importance for Christians themselves. Indeed, from at least the fourth century, Catholic Church officials admonished against nonreligious activities at shrines. During the Reformation, Martin Luther condemned pilgrimages as giving “countless occasions to commit sin and to despise God’s commandments” and Catholic counter-reformers discouraged them in favor of devotions closer to home. Nineteenth-century American Protestants, even as they set out on Holy Land tours, feared that consumer self-gratification would debase Christianity. Analogous discussions unfolded at Lourdes, a major Catholic pilgrimage site that was then developing in France.32 Today, theologians, clergy members, and pilgrims themselves are still aware of and may be concerned about the intermingling of Christianity and behavior they construe as “commercial” or “materialistic.”33 With this in mind, I frame the interaction between religion and commerce (and by extension pilgrimage and tourism) holistically. What I mean is that it is necessary to explore this question from multiple angles: how Americans make sense (to themselves and to others) of a commercial trip that is also a religious experience; how pilgrimage operators develop ways to obscure commercial processes; and how, on the trip, the actual exchange of money for goods can be justified and even lauded while pilgrims still use the rhetoric of “commercialization” to distinguish between between self and the Other at shared Holy Land sites. A related issue bears addressing. Commodities, including vacation leisure, not only muddy the sacred/profane divide, they are also often tied to notions of religious individualism. Indeed, a major sociological

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necessary precondition of the trip.38 Yet pilgrims’ goals are related to enhancing relationships at home and with divine beings, not with other members of the (short-lived) group. The result is a tension between the individual and the collective that, for pilgrims, feels satisfying nonetheless. To understand this pattern, I draw on what sociologist Nancy T. Ammerman terms “Golden Rule Christianity,” referring to the ethic of reciprocity expressed in the phrase “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It is, she argues, perhaps the dominant form of religiosity among middle-class suburban Americans today.39 On the pilgrimage, it is expressed in a commitment to avoid conflict at all costs. Though the result may seem to share characteristics with Turnerian communitas, the impetus is different. For pilgrims, being conflict averse is an extension of everyday practice, although the stakes are higher in the Holy Land where no one wants to risk ruining his or her “trip of a lifetime.” Here, as above, it is not enough to describe American pilgrims on mass-market trips as individualistic. The question must be, with whom do pilgrims see themselves in relationship and why?

Home and Away: Global Travel and Domestic Relationships The Holy Land trip can confirm or cap a longer journey of faith. It is bound up in life-cycle transitions and relationships: faith sharing with friends, praying for one’s children, speaking daily to the Divine. While these preoccupations are not unexpected for Christians, especially middle-old women, there is something surprising, even paradoxical, about pilgrims’ belief that flying far away will help them meet the responsibilities and deepen the identities they inhabit at home. To some degree, the interplay of home and away has always been central in the anthropological study of pilgrimage. Throughout the 1980s, scholars debated Turnerian anti-structuralism: Did pilgrims “cease to be members of a perduring system of social relations (family, lineage, village, neighborhood, town, state)” during their time away? Did the experience of pilgrimage have the potential to affect societal structure and, if so, did it reverse or reinforce it? This conversation moved in new directions following the theoretical turn to postmodernity and globalization in the 1990s. Theorists loosed pilgrimage from its historical and institutional moorings, adopting it as a metaphor for “liquid modernity,”

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wide ranging, ultimately he grounds his argument in a model of lived religion: his inspiration lies in how the Cuban exiles with whom he works articulate transnational subjectivities clearly and often.45 Pilgrims to the Holy Land complicate this phenomenological model and therefore offer a case study that expands upon Tweed’s call to more consciously theorize how global processes operate at the grassroots. Unlike the Cuban Americans in Tweed’s work, the men and women in this book rarely think of themselves as “global” people, even as they engage in transnational tourism. This is particularly true of the women, who are much less likely than their husbands to have traveled abroad for work or military service and who often feel that their best, truest self is evident in the care they provide locally for family and friends. Thus, for example, when a pilgrim named Patty told me that she was “really a down-home person” as we stood in Jericho—a far-off place that few U.S. Christians ever get to see—she was not speaking ironically or wonderingly or defending her integrity as a “true” American (although some certainly do). She was simply stating a fact. She has no family abroad, is unilingual, watches U.S. media and news, and has never traveled so far before and likely will not do so again. She was enjoying herself but sorely missed her husband, her kids, and her own bed. Patty is indeed a down-home person. The difficulty I faced in conceptualizing this project, then, and the one that faces studies of lived religion more broadly, is how to acknowledge the subjectivity of pilgrims such as Patty while also examining global “crossings.” One way, I propose, is to follow Tweed in his multivalent use of “home,” a word that pilgrims also use often and in a variety of ways. Home is a brick-and-mortar place where the family resides, the very heart of Christian nurture as conceived by modern Americans. It is the United States and the imagined Holy Land as well as the intangible afterlife when one goes “home to the Lord.” Home is comfort, security, and doing one’s duty yet it can also lull believers into a dangerous spiritual rut. Therein lies the power of pilgrimage. It is a leap of faith—exciting, a little dangerous, a large expenditure—that is also to a home place, which Americans feel they have known viscerally since childhood. Moreover, pilgrims travel for home reasons: the trip confirms the faith that makes them a “ritual expert” in the places and with the people they know best.46

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authenticity to places and objects in the Holy Land, by which they mean that they are powerful because they are inherently sacred or unique. It is a perspective that in scholarship is most often associated with early theorists of religion such as Mircea Eliade and that was largely rejected in favor of a postmodern view of sacred places as empty vessels meaningful only through semiotic construction.49 Like most current scholars of religion, I take a measured approach between these poles, harking back to theorists such as Turner and Bourdieu: how pilgrims engage with a particular place is framed by discourse, but it is also shaped by the physical objects and geography around them.50 In studies of Holy Land pilgrimage, these questions about authenticity and materiality inevitably draw on assumed differences between Protestants and Catholics. Historians and anthropologists are today broadly aware that Protestant models have played a formative role in the study of religion. One result was that the physical and aesthetic dimensions of American Christianity were given short shrift. “Real” religion was construed as spiritual and theological.51 That same logic, neatly reversed, still operates in studies of Christian pilgrimage: the implicit assumption is that it is Catholics, not Protestants, who travel to religiously meaningful places. Work on contemporary travel to the Holy Land, though exceptional in its focus on evangelicals, reproduces the divide between materiality and anti-materiality, taking as a starting point that Protestants seek open (outdoor) places devoid of material culture while Catholics gravitate toward shrines crowded with the stuff of ritual.52 Undeniably, sound historical factors undergird this view. While the Catholic Church has become more critical of many devotions, especially since the Second Vatican Council, there is still a rich theological tradition that connects the sacred to the material world. In contrast, the protest of the Reformation was largely a rejection of Catholic sacramentalism. Early Protestant theologians believed that the Church encouraged the collapse of the sacred and the secular, which muddied God’s relationship to man and distracted from grace, faith, and scripture. Pilgrimages were highly problematic in that respect, associated as they were with miracles, salvation through “works,” and the veneration of saints. Reformists eschewed the physical practice in favor of the metaphoric. As seventeenth-century armchair pilgrim and Protestant apologist Samuel Purchas drily noted, “Thy selfe is the holyest place thou canst visit.”53

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traditional sense, my purpose was nevertheless to elicit pilgrims’ stories of self: how they made sense of the trip and its import in their lives. American scholars have gathered oral histories since at least the early twentieth century, but critical attention to the role of narrative as such really dates to the 1960s, when scholarship turned from realism to “reading” texts. It is appropriate that one of the early studies informing this theoretical shift was Maurice Halbwachs’s The Legendary Topography of the Gospels in the Holy Land (1941). Using Western travel accounts, he showed how the facts pilgrims construed as real actually reflected different historical periods. Individual narrative, Halbwachs concluded, is shaped by collective memory, which changes over time.56 His insight then is no less true today. American pilgrims’ descriptions depend on cultural, historical, and personal experience. Their accounts are also “the creation of a particular situation in the moment of its telling,” and my interlocutors, no doubt consciously and unconsciously, redacted their narratives depending on, for example, earlier conversations or whether I interviewed them with their spouses. Not least, what they said was shaped by the fact that they were participating in an interview (no matter how unstructured) conducted by an academic, non-Christian, non-American, young white woman. And although I tried to minimize it, my body language (was I interested? uncomfortable? tired?) undoubtedly made an impact. As a number of scholars have pointed out, interviewer and interviewee are best understood as co-creators of narrative.57 Westerners are trained from childhood in techniques of “narrative shaping,” of imposing meaningful patterns on events, of paring down stories to a core narrative arc, and the Christians with whom I spoke were often practiced storytellers about their faith. Yet they, like everyone, had moments when narrative became messy, when it changed over time, when it was contradictory, when they lapsed into silence. None of this means that their stories of self were “made up” or untrue, and my intent is not to contest what is vitally real for them.58 In fact, the people with whom I spoke were generally well aware that narrative is not static. Some even agreed to take part precisely because they wanted to compare what they said “before” and “after.” Nevertheless, at certain moments my observations or conclusions, particularly when I probe silences or point out inconsistencies, may not correspond with those of the pilgrims; I try to signal when this is the case.

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As I wrote this book, televangelist and megatrip leader Jack Hayford was advertising his Holy Land ministry as “more than just a trip . . . [it will be] a pilgrimage—a sacred journey born not of superstition but of a conviction that a divine purpose will be served by our journey.”60 In qualitative interviews, 71 percent of American evangelicals referred to themselves as pilgrims, as did 89 percent of Catholics.61 Evangelicals who rejected the word generally did so because it felt foreign to them; they preferred “religious tourist” or “Christian traveler.” Catholics who opted not to use “pilgrimage” did so mainly for personal reasons: they did not feel religious about the trip, a sentiment I heard most often from men accompanying their wives. Noting these exceptions, I nevertheless use pilgrim to simplify my prose and because most interviewees did feel that the word best evoked the seriousness of their endeavor. Monica, a 55-year-old Catholic administrator in Raleigh, offered a typical response: “The tourist is just looking at places and pilgrims are trying to feel what God is saying or how they see God in that experience.” Another term that requires brief explication is “Holy Land.” When Christians use it, they implicitly or explicitly efface contested political boundaries, modern people, and states. In Jesus’ day, the places now called the Holy Land were in Galilee and Judaea, outposts of the Roman Empire. Renamed Palestine, the region was then ruled by the Byzantines and Islamic dynasties, and in the sixteenth century, it was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire. During World War I, the Turks lost Palestine, which the British then controlled for a 30-year “mandate” until the formation of the states of Israel and Jordan. As the dust settled after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, most of the Christian sites were in Jordan, but they changed hands again after the 1967 war. Since that time, the places “where Jesus walked” are mainly in Israel, although some (notably Bethlehem) are under the Palestinian Authority. Noting these territorial realities, I chose to use “Holy Land” for consistency and because it is the term I heard most, although pilgrims also say they are going to Israel and evangelicals sometimes use “Bible Lands” to signal the importance of the Word. For the most part, pilgrims use these terms interchangeably, though they may unconsciously tailor their language to suit specific audiences. A Catholic interviewee, for example, noted that when she spoke to a Unitarian friend, “I didn’t

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due to the influence of a few group members and was made possible because the tour provider, a small Massachusetts-based company, was able to customize the itinerary as we went. Mike and Jim were both exceptionally welcoming to me and I participated in all activities. With permission, I tape recorded and otherwise I furiously scribbled notes. Though the pilgrims made (gentle) fun of my dedicated writing, there was just enough journaling that I did not look completely out of place. In many ways, too, I blended in as a cultural insider. I am not, however, as much an insider as some recent ethnographers of American Christianity.63 First, I am Canadian. We know a lot about the United States—more than any other country does—but our understanding of its culture and history is not precisely the same as Americans’ own (this is obvious to me now but was surprising when I first got to graduate school). Throughout my research I encountered norms that were new to me, especially in the South. Being foreign (“the good kind of foreign,” one pilgrim assured me) seemed to give me license to ask nagging “but why?” questions about cultural or political issues that pilgrims assumed were unfamiliar to me. It also offered protective armor when I felt uncomfortable around those whose politics differed significantly from my own; the general impression that Canada is “socialist” seemed to allow me to say outlandishly liberal things without causing offense. Another difference that I sometimes felt keenly was that I am Jewish. Given the recent turn in evangelical circles toward philosemitism, my religion actually shielded me from potentially uncomfortable attempts to proselytize. If anthropologist Susan Harding was considered a “lost soul” by her interlocutors, I was understood to be a member of an important religious tradition, though some evangelical pilgrims expressed hope that I would be “fulfilled” through Christ.64 More important, I think, is my own subjectivity in this regard. Growing up among friends of the lapsed United Church or Catholic variety, I had always thought of myself as someone “with a religion,” although my dayto-day routine was the same as theirs. In this sense, when I approached the pilgrims, I did so as a non-Christian but also as an insider to faith in the broad sense: I understood why it was important and why one might want to transmit it to one’s children. Interactions with Catholic pilgrims felt natural to me from the beginning; I grew up with Catholicism as the de facto majority religion and

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Holy Lands in the Halbwachsian sense: the collective representations in Sunday school lessons, travel narratives, and news media that have colored American Christians’ impressions since childhood. Few studies of contemporary pilgrimage offer the overview that I do here, but it seems an obvious place to begin since this book is an interdisciplinary endeavor and thanks to historians, there is a particularly rich set of sources detailing the production and circulation of Holy Land images between Europe, North America, and Palestine before World War I.66 The first chapter also introduces a discussion about the role of tour industry producers: U.S. companies, the Israel Ministry of Tourism, and local guides. When Americans choose to go to the Holy Land today they are drawing on what now seem to be self-evident connections between Jesus and the Bible and its associated places. More immediately, they sign up because of personal experiences related to a plethora of social, cultural, and gender dynamics. They often undertake the pilgrimage during times of disruption or loss related to their stage in the life course. Chapter 2 takes up these themes, looking more closely at pilgrims’ own stories of self: why they go and how they prepare. It also examines how pilgrims demand, and the tour industry provides, models of consumption that (at least partially) obscure commercial exchange and reconstitute traditional forms of Christianity en route. The middle three chapters situate the reader with the pilgrims as they travel in the land where Jesus walked. Chapter 3 builds on recent scholarship on sensory perception and materiality in American religion in order to explore how Protestants approach the problem of presence. Chapter 4 shifts the focus to American Catholics. Drawing on work in Catholic studies that reevaluates the impact of the Second Vatican Council, I situate the pilgrimage at the nexus of postconciliar and “traditional” practices in contemporary Catholicism. These two chapters also seek to destabilize patterns in the scholarship on pilgrimage by associating evangelicals with materiality and Catholics with the Word. Chapter 5 most clearly concerns what anthropologist James Clifford called “contact zones,” the places where people encounter each other and where contestation may occur.67 It is most often in interactions with Orthodox Christians, local Jews, and Muslims that American pilgrims confront the porous boundaries between spirit, commerce, and politics.

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fire-and-brimstone” Baptist church, as she puts it, and a series of factory and fast-food jobs to pay the rent. Today, she lives alone and is fiercely proud of her self-reliance. She often repeats that “a little work never killed nobody” and “what don’t kill you makes you stronger,” expressions that might seem trite if they did not so clearly represent her life. Dorothy and I were roommates on Pastor Jim’s trip. A few months before our departure, she lost her job and was not optimistic about getting rehired at her age. Sitting one morning beneath the trees outside our Galilee hotel, she said to me, “If someone says, ‘I’d pay you any trip in the world’ I’d say, ‘Pay me one to Israel.’” She continued, musing, I don’t know why, I just like it over here. Well, I do. It’s because this is where Jesus was born, lived and died. And the people here are so nice, smile and treat you so nice. Not like at home where it’s dog-eat-dog and if you’ve got something I want I’m a-gonna get it. If I could stay, I’d sell everything I have and say to my kids, “Adios! Give me a call sometime!” It seems like you forget the rest of the world, all your worries are gone until you get back on that plane to come home. It’s peaceful here.

When scholars write about pilgrims like Dorothy, they tell us about her political affiliations (or, more often, about those of the men who lead and guide her). They describe how she sees the land and its inhabitants as romanticized relics of the past.70 Dorothy may certainly feel that way, but if we attend closely, she tells us something rather different too. Two central premises run throughout this book. The first concerns how, for those who undertake it, the Holy Land pilgrimage is a conscious return to the “source” of early Christianity that is also deeply embedded in its late-modern context; pilgrims become participants in a lucrative leisure industry and in an international travel experience made possible (even for women like Dorothy and Dale) by the global flows that characterize our lives to an unprecedented degree. The second premise proceeds from the first. While we should not ignore the singularity of the journey itself, it is fully embedded in longer trajectories: as a stage in an individual’s life course; as a part of cultural, theological, and political trends; and as an aspect of ongoing relationships at home. These contexts are fleshed out in the three broad themes mentioned earlier. The first of these explores the material manifestation

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Figure 1.2. A photo of the Jordan River baptismal site today. Courtesy of Kathy Martin.

American Holy Land Mania Among Protestants, “Holy Land mania,” as Obenzinger puts it, dates to the latter half of the nineteenth century.6 It encompassed the development of tourism, such as the Cook’s tours mentioned earlier, but it was much broader too, since the Holy Land was implicated in how American Protestants responded to ideas stemming from the European Enlightenment. When historical criticism raised questions about the authorship and inerrancy of the Bible and the veracity of miraculous events, liberal Christians reacted by adopting a moral hermeneutic based on the human side of Jesus’ ministry. Conservatives defended biblical literalism, formulating a response using Scottish Common Sense philosophy. In its American form, this intellectual current posited that reality— including right and wrong—could be experienced directly through the senses from the material world. For liberals, descriptions of the Holy Land thus added important and edifying details to what was known about Jesus’ earthly life. For conservatives, the geography and ancient

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Jesus in his own time: they were taught to picture incidents in the Savior’s home or school life, which were invariably similar to their own, in order to draw moral lessons about how a Christian should behave.11 Biblical archeology was central in these atlases, and today it still features strongly in how Israeli guides lead evangelical tours. Among conservative Christians, especially those of a more intellectual bent, archeology appealed as an Enlightenment science that was understood to serve the interests of faith against historical criticism and Darwinism. It did not hurt that it was also tied to longstanding anti-Catholicism. Protestant criticism was particularly harsh concerning the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, built on the site where the Catholic and Orthodox churches believe Jesus was crucified and buried. Widely read travelogues grimly remarked on the Church’s dirtiness and gaudiness, and the outbursts of violence between resident priests. The sepulchre exemplified the “puerile inventions of monkly credulity,” one nineteenth-century visitor sniffed, and today some evangelicals still dismiss it as the “Church of Bells and Smells.”12 From the 1880s on, Anglo-American Protestants promoted their own site, a quiet spot owned and operated by the English called the Garden Tomb (also called Skull Hill because of its shape or Gordon’s Calvary, after the British general who popularized it). To prove its legitimacy, supporters shored up decades of archeology. William W. Orr, a pilgrim in 1960, wrote about the tomb for Moody Monthly. “Was this really the place of our Lord’s burial?” he asks rhetorically. “Were General Gordon, [archeologist] Sir Charles Marston and many other competent and godly examiners correct in their steadfast conviction that this was indeed the spot?” Orr’s answer is a resounding yes. Photographs of the tomb’s entrance were widely reproduced in magazines, textbooks, and church slideshows. Likely the most extensive early promotion was radio evangelist Paul Radar’s photograph at the Tomb, of which he distributed 15,000 copies across North America.13 Almost all Protestants strike the same pose as Radar did when they visit today. American Catholics have their own set of Holy Land references, filtered mainly through the Franciscans, the Vatican-appointed custodians of the Holy Land since the fourteenth century. The U.S. Commissariat, which was established in 1882, was careful to defend the authority of traditional sites against Protestant naysayers. Father Godfrey Schilling, the first American

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Figure 1.4. Moody Monthly correspondent William Orr strikes the same pose in 1960.

Figure 1.5. Tom and Jo Weyrick, an evangelical couple from Minnesota, on a 2007 trip. In an e-mail to family, they captioned this photo, “A sign on the door says, ‘HE IS NOT HERE— FOR HE IS RISEN.’” Used with permission.

Belittling Protestant innovation, Catholics drew instead on a well of romanticized medieval history, made manifest at the Franciscan Monastery of Mount St. Sepulchre in Washington, D.C. Billed as the “Holy Land in America,” its construction was completed in 1899, championed by Father Schilling and fellow Franciscan Charles Vassani. The monastery houses an ornate Byzantine-style church with large reproductions

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books” enthralling America’s youth. Today, Catholic pilgrims often recall these childhood stories about the young Jesus and his family as well as the imagined recreations of his death evoked during devotions such as the Stations of the Cross.20

Theological Shifts since the Second World War Until the early 1960s, most American pilgrims were mainline Protestants or Catholics and thus believed in some aspect of supersessionist (or replacement) theology. Dating from the second century, this theology states that Jews had forfeited their covenant with God when they denied that Jesus was the Messiah. As a result, the biblical promises related to redemption and to being a “chosen people” passed to Christians.21 A 1948 editorial in the Catholic lay journal Commonweal illustrates this position: “Israel, for every Christian, is the whole redeemed world, and all peoples, since the Incarnation. . . . Despite our sympathy for Israeli and for Jew, we must not forget that to think of the Law and the Prophets as historically given only to their physical descendants, is a minimizing and a belittling of the greatest fact in human history and of the role of the people chosen to lead all mankind to bear witness to the Light.”22 The Second Vatican Council, also called Vatican II, opened the way for major changes in this theology. Initiated by Pope John XXIII, the council was a series of four sessions held in Rome from 1962 to 1965, during which more than 3,000 delegates generated a series of sixteen documents. Among them was Nostra Aetate, which formally absolved Jews of deicide, thus ending the theological notion that they were cursed to remain in the Diaspora.23 For American Catholics, this new theology was coupled with cultural change as ecumenical dialogue with the Jewish community intensified. The 1967 war mobilized American Jewry into near-universal approval of Israel, and they pushed their dialogue partners to formally recognize that the covenant God made with the Jews was fundamentally linked to the Holy Land. In addition, Catholic theologians formulated justifications for Israel as a moral necessity after the Holocaust and compared Jewish ties to Israel with their own to Rome. In 1969, American bishops asserted that the state of Israel was integral to Judaism. Though the Church did not formally take this position, the Vatican quieted its calls for the internationalization

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of biblical Israelites, still have a role to play in ushering in the return of Christ, since a significant number of the “remnant” must fulfill prophecy by returning to the land God promised them (e.g. Isaiah 10:20–23).29 The war of 1967, when Israel took East Jerusalem, sparked greater interest in prophecy than ever before. Jerusalem was crucial for many dispensationalists, who believed that if one read the Bible literally, the Antichrist’s arrival depended upon the restoration of Jewish rule and the reconstruction of the ancient temple. Headlines in evangelical publications pulsed with excitement: “War Sweeps Bible Lands: Frantic Nations Forget the Prophetic Vision,” “Jerusalem: A Third Temple?” “Israel: Things to Come, Rumors of Temple in Works.”30 Apocalyptic prophecy literature grew into the enormously popular and profitable genre it remains today. Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth (1970) sold over 34 million copies and was number one on the New York Times list of nonfiction bestsellers of the decade. As televangelism and Christian TV developed and bookstores multiplied in the 1970s, they popularized a host of do-it-yourself media to help Christians evaluate the secular news according to end times prophecy.31 Although there is debate about the details, today most U.S. evangelicals, including Holy Land pilgrims, incorporate some aspect of premillennial dispensationalism into their theology, and nearly all evangelical leaders believe that Israel should retain control over the land it gained in 1967.32 Until the late 1970s, another major preoccupation for evangelicals was Christian missions in Israel. The Gospels say the Word should be preached “to the Jew first” (Romans 1:16), and after the mid-nineteenth century, scores of missionary organizations developed to target U.S. and Palestinian Jewry.33 At its establishment, the state of Israel instituted quotas regulating the influx of Christian missionaries, basing visas on historic presence. Many American evangelical groups and churches that were newly established or were new to the mission field found themselves at a disadvantage. Mid-century evangelical news reports thus covered two major types of stories related to missionaries in Israel: conversion successes and the Jewish persecution of American “workers.” The media kept tabs on a broad range of incidents, from state rules that forbade Billy Graham from saying “Jesus” to Jewish audiences to actual acts of violence, such as when a group stoned a U.S.-run church, chanting “Eichmann! Eichmann!”34 In 1961, evangelical publishing leaders

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“religious anger and frustration towards non-Messianic Jews, who continue to reject the Messiah who came to them first.”39 Today anti-missionary laws rarely make the news, but frustration or confusion still exists. While conservative evangelicals idealize Israelis in the abstract and talk about the Jews as God’s “chosen race,” they often find their own Jewish neighbors distressingly unlike themselves. Scholars and journalists covering U.S. Zionism focus on Jewish-Christian alliances, but most American Jews and conservative evangelicals are at odds on domestic policy, especially so-called morality or family issues such as abortion, gay marriage, or school prayer.40 One pastor and trip leader noted that for his congregants, If you’re here in the U.S., the typical Jewish person or synagogue . . . it seems like anything goes. It doesn’t square up with the Ten Commandments. It’s easy to see they don’t believe in the Bible. I say [to my groups], after you’ve been [in Israel] for ten days . . . you’ll see they live a different life there than they do here in America. . . . You’ll say, I don’t know how God is going to deal with every Jewish person but when it comes to dealing with the Jewish people as a race, God will treat them a little differently [from anyone else]. (Emphasis in original.)

As evangelical philosemitism has grown since the 1970s, televangelists and tour-leading pastors have addressed lingering ambivalence by separating the idealized Jewish race—invoked in sermons and glimpsed through interactions with Israeli guides—from Jewish American individuals who can still seem to be inveterate sinners by evangelical lights.41

New Jews and the Strange Permanence of Holy Land Arabs Before 1948, U.S. Christian travelers frequently described Jewish Holy Land inhabitants as poverty-stricken beggars, which they saw as fitting punishment for their crimes against Christ and their refusal to accept the Gospel. This image changed significantly after 1948. Israelis were portrayed as hard-working, salt-of-the-earth farmers who used American-made plows and trucks, symbols of progress and the West.42 Writing in 1950, Ralph McGill, the influential editor of The Atlanta Constitution, described meeting William Stern, a Jewish American émigré

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even flown in from Galilee), yet director George Stevens opted to film in Utah. He reasoned that although “the Jordan Valley and the country we used for the Jordan Valley here were absolutely interchangeable,” the Holy Land has “been worn down through the years by erosion and man, invaders and wars, to places of less spectacular aspects.”48 Paradoxically, then, while the state of Israel brought to mind the “virgin soil” of the pioneer West, the Holy Land could be viewed ambivalently, especially in the Protestant imagination, as a place steeped in history—with all the wear and tear that this entails. Immortalized and improved in films such as The Greatest Story, the Hollywood Holy Land was a vast, rugged, and empty place; today’s pilgrims are often most surprised by how small and “built up” Israel feels. And for their part, tour providers have been happy to play along. “Our Tours,” promised one 1966 advertisement, “are like all the Hollywood Biblical Extravaganzas Rolled into One.”49 While today’s pilgrims are less interested in Israeli farming and pioneering than pilgrims a generation ago were, the country and its people are still perceived as fundamentally linked to the United States through their democratic spirit, technological know-how, and manly ability to fight.50 The major exception is the images of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men at the Kotel or Wailing Wall that are widely featured in missionary tracts, travel accounts, and photographs. While Christians once believed that their “wailing” bespoke divine justice, this changed with the shift away from replacement theology. It is illustrated, for instance, in former Southern Baptist Convention president, and tour leader, Wayne Dehoney’s 1968 photo slideshow at his Kentucky church. Exemplifying the new interpretation, he told his congregants, “These are Orthodox Jews standing at the Wailing Wall. . . . They stand at the wall as it was in the days of Jesus.” For Dehoney, the wall, and by extension the Orthodox men at prayer, is one of the few material traces from the time of Jesus, a glimpse into biblical-era Judaism.51 This is the dominant understanding today. Being at the Wailing Wall is thus a highlight for many Christian visitors because Jews—so symbolically and theologically important— are finally made visible to them. Other Israelis who dress like Americans and do nothing identifiably Jewish cannot fulfill their yearning to see at least one example of exoticized Judaism in the Holy Land.52 Ironically, it is most often Holy Land Arabs who have provided the living proof of idealized Jewish biblical characters—by engaging in such

Figures 1.6 (above) and 1.7 (below). In these images, printed side by side in a 1961 article in a Catholic magazine, modern Israelis (raising a national flag) are contrasted with traditional Arabs in the bazaar. From Daniel Madden, “Citizens of the Holy Land,” Columbia, May 1961, 24. Reprinted with permission from the Knights of Columbus, New Haven, Connecticut.

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activities as shepherding, fishing, riding donkeys, and wearing sandals and robes. These images, which date to the nineteenth century, were carried over into the mid-twentieth when depictions of young vigorous Israelis were often reinforced through juxtaposition with Holy Land Arabs who, paraphrasing a 1965 travel advertisement for Lufthansa, seemed to “strangely cherish permanence.”53 When Arab people failed to deliver the expected experience, American visitors often blamed them (or Israelis) for changing the “true” character of the Holy Land and its people.54 In the 1970s, Americans’ view of Holy Land Arabs changed dramatically. U.S. media began to show with increasing frequency the graphic “conflict images” from the Middle East and elsewhere that remain a staple of television today. Most Americans saw the 1967 war as unwarranted Arab aggression.55 This view was compounded by wide coverage of a series of Palestinian attacks that followed: the 1972 massacre at the Munich Olympics, the 1973 war, the 1976 hijacking of an Air France plane (Operation Entebbe), and assaults on Christian tourists. By the decade’s end, Holy Land Arabs had acquired a reputation as irrationally violent, and the image of swathed terrorists was firmly impressed in the American mind.56 American visitors were also confronted with the fact that the Holy Land Arabs who had for so long personified the Gospels had a religion of their own. Pamela, an evangelical who traveled to the Holy Land in 1973, recalls being awakened on her first night in Jerusalem by “this awful noise like a giant bee.” She recognized the Muslim call to prayer from news footage. “And I thought, ‘My goodness, this should never be!’ You never heard that during Jesus and the Apostles’ time.”57 For pilgrims such as Pamela, the presence of Jews and Christians makes theological sense, but Islam, which postdates the apostles by five centuries, simply does not fit. Today, though they are aware that Arabs are not stand-ins for biblical Jews, many American visitors are left feeling confused about what exactly they are doing there at all.

Tour Industry Development and Dynamics In the early 1960s, the Israeli Ministry of Tourism (IMOT) began a concentrated effort to attract Christians, while airlines such as TWA, Swissair, and Alitalia hired professionals to tap into the U.S. tourism market.58 For the first time, secular entities adopted Christian images

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1970s, Terra Sanctas were awarded to Billy Graham Evangelistic Association tour leader Roy Gustafson and evangelical tour industry giant Pano Anastasato. Notably, this DEP activity prefigured Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s 1978 overtures to Jerry Falwell, which is usually seen as the beginning of the Israel-evangelical alliance.64 Although today Catholics make up more than half of Israel’s Christian visitors, evangelicals comprise about 35 percent of the lucrative and ideologically important U.S. market, and IMOT still shapes its promotional efforts to encourage the growth of this segment.65 For American pilgrims, one of the most noticeable post-1967 changes concerned tour guides. The Israeli government made it a point to license and train Jewish guides for Christian sites. This policy has been addressed in a number of scholarly articles that examine Christian-Jewish relations or are critical of Zionist politics.66 Palestinian companies that had been in business for twenty years or more were denied licenses or could not compete with government-supported Jewish firms. In addition, Arab guides were rarely accepted into the mandatory state training program. The views of Hani Abu Dayyeh, who runs one of the oldest extant Christian Arab companies and is former president of the Higher Council for the Arab Tour Industry, are typical of many Arab tour professionals: he feels that Israel’s policies disrupted an earlier pattern whereby Holy Land pilgrimage operated along religious lines—Christians took care of Christian pilgrims, Muslims took care of Muslims, and Jews took care of Jews. In such a structure, the 2 percent Christian minority would control fully 60 percent of the contemporary tour market.67 These lines were never so neatly drawn, of course. And while it is true that since the nineteenth century U.S. Christians have overwhelmingly preferred Christian guides, Americans have rarely defined “Christian” as Abu Dayyeh does. Most Western pilgrims have never (and do not today) consider an Eastern Orthodox Arab suitable as a Christian guide. The Catholic Church has dealt with this dilemma by maintaining its own system of guides that was negotiated with the Ottomans and reaffirmed with the Israelis after 1967. Whereas other tour guides in Israel are required to hold a government-issued license, for which they must follow a standard IMOT course, Franciscan priests are licensed directly by the Jerusalem custos, the Vatican-appointed superior of their Holy Land order. This system relies on the presence of foreign priests

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evangelicals and those from conservative areas of the United States, refer to the “clash of civilizations” to explain their discomfort. Sharon, a 65-year-old Baptist from Texas on Pastor Jim’s trip, says that although she prefers a Christian, a Jewish guide would be fine: “The guide’s job is not to show his religion to you. If we had a Jewish guide, I would expect he would keep it to himself.” But when asked about a Muslim guide, she balked and, as is sometimes the case with American evangelicals, was confused about the fact that Islam considers Jesus a prophet and Judaism does not. With a Muslim I would not be comfortable. The way I understand the five pillars of Islam, [they] are in direct opposition to Christianity. . . . In their teachings, Jews accept Jesus to a point [because] they think he was a prophet but they do not believe he was the Messiah. . . . But Muslims don’t believe anybody but Muslims are going to heaven. . . . We don’t believe that! In our world, you just have to believe in Jesus and you go to heaven.71

Americans such as Sharon are concerned about their guides because they view them as having a crucial interpretive role. On this point, local guides—Israeli Jewish or Palestinian—are also in agreement. As the primary (or only) local with whom American visitors speak at any length, guides are conscious of having a unique opportunity to shape the group’s outlook, and many therefore spend significant time promoting their political/theological ideologies. Yusef, the Palestinian guide on Mike’s trip, pointed out every poor Arab village we passed, while Gilad, the Jewish guide on Jim’s trip, drew our attention to modern Israeli farms and towns. Though guides tend to focus on how their interpretations mold group discourse, it is more accurate to think of the pilgrim-guide relationship as a co-productive one. Both U.S. pilgrims and Holy Land locals define, authorize, and are constrained by certain narratives that long predate the moment when a guide meets his or her group at Ben Gurion Airport. These images and ideas are part of a transnationally circulating “scape” that flows in and out of the United States and is produced and consumed by Americans, Europeans, Israelis, and Palestinians.72 At the microlevel, the dynamics on the bus also reflect the fact that guides work within a competitive, tip-driven market and therefore

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their life-cycle stage. As they weigh whether to make the trip, they must make sense of its commercial nature, address concerns about safety and death, and, for women especially, contextualize the desire to leave as part of their responsibilities at home. If these tensions are articulated successfully, prospective pilgrims mediate them and, further, position the experience as a powerful way to reconfirm their own relationship with God and enact their faith as a witness for those they leave behind.

“A shamrock in your pocket”: Pied Pipers and the Christian Tour Industry Once Helen and Sam decided to go, they began to search for a group. Helen belongs to a small Baptist church and Sam’s family attends the new evangelical megachurch one town away. Because neither church was running a trip, Sam contacted Jim, the Baptist pastor with whom he had gone previously. Jim lives about an hour from them, so he “feels like home folks,” Helen was pleased to note, and, satisfied, they signed up. Like most American pilgrims, Sam and Helen sought a prepackaged group tour. The form these trips take owes much to the influence of an early market leader, a Greek immigrant named Pano Anastasato. Drawing on techniques gleaned from working as a tour promoter at Swissair and Alitalia, he formed Wholesale Tours International (WTI) in 1962. Over the next two decades, he controlled much of the nascent evangelical tour market and trained men who today run some of the foremost U.S. companies, including Journeys Unlimited, which organized Pastor Jim’s trip in 2009 and Pastor Derek’s in 2012.2 Anastasato’s major innovation was to introduce the pyramid sales system whereby, rather than selling directly to consumers, tour operators contract a pastor to do so in exchange for free trips and cash bonuses. Besides leading the group, he collects pilgrims’ deposits for the company, which then pays all the major expenditures in advance. Industry professionals call these pastorleaders “Pied Pipers,” after the medieval tale about the piper who lured children with his enchanting music. “Anyone who can sell you God can sell you anything,” Anastasato used to quip cynically.3 Pied Pipers take a number of forms. Large Protestant organizations and megachurches, such as the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association or, formerly, Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral, rely on the draw of a

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and a worry that such niceties were at odds with their religious goals. American Catholics, who often stayed at comparatively spare Franciscan guesthouses and drew on a well-established theological justification for pilgrimage, were less bothered by this dilemma than conservative Protestants were. Mid-century evangelicals and fundamentalists debated whether pilgrimage slideshows were as edifying as those about foreign missions. They wrote into magazines and newspapers, declaring, “I cannot feel extravagances of any kind are proper for Christians in these perilous days,” or “going to the Holy Land has become an obsession and a status symbol.”7 As historian Bethany Moreton notes of the development of the Walmart company among conservative Christians in the same period, “the challenge [for Walmart] was to find a form of purchasing that did not suggest sensual self-indulgence.”8 Pilgrimage producers faced a task even more daunting: they not only had to assure potential clients that the commercial model would not interfere with religious ideals, they also had to convincingly show that it would bolster them. By tasking trusted pastors and priests with gathering clients’ money and by arranging all expenditures in advance, pilgrimage companies not only maximized profits but masked players or processes that seemed un-Christian, coming as close as possible to severing the trip from its commercial moorings. Ideally, the pilgrim remained blissfully unaware of who pocketed her money; most days in the Holy Land, she did not even have to open her wallet. The system still required refining. In 1973, the Louisville Times printed a series of exposés that castigated pastors for receiving large cash bonuses, especially from non-Christian companies. Anastasato’s WTI, the author remarked pointedly, was “Greek-owned.”9 This critique was a harbinger of significant changes in the industry’s rhetoric and orientation. Since the early 1980s, most companies have eliminated cash incentives and have begun to promote their religious credentials. Tour companies headed by non-evangelicals, including WTI, have largely given way to those that not only hire Christian tour leaders but emphasize that they are owned by Christians too. Pilgrimage operators in the 1970s profited from and promoted the rise of nondenominational evangelicalism. Like large suburban churches and television ministries, they used new marketing technologies with great success, such as computer-generated client lists and professional TV advertisements.10 Less directly, they benefited from the

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[In] 1998–1999, I took two groups of American Catholic bishops. [The state of] Israel had been trying like crazy to get them so I did it and it was great publicity [for Unitours] and many of them went back in 2000 with groups. [Israel] was doing it for the publicity and political purposes, [but] I said, “I’ll take you on a pilgrimage.” . . . The bishops take faith seriously and the Israelis don’t. [At Unitours] we do too and the bishops understand this. I know the most profound place to celebrate Mass and to have healing services . . . because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen miraculous things there.

Faucett’s description combines the savvy of a true businessman (“it was great publicity”) with the passion of a believer. Though he is a charismatic Catholic and thus the bishops would not likely concur with his description of healing miracles, his story is meant to illustrate the fundamental bond he shares with his Catholic clients that distinguishes him, he feels, from Israelis who only focus on publicity and politics.14

Cheerful Cooperation: Group Travel and Christian Fellowship Pilgrimage leaders and organizers understand the importance of nurturing a sense of intra-religious connection in the group. Participants eagerly anticipate, indeed expect, that a major part of their experience will be shared Masses, communion, and being in “Christian fellowship” with “people of like mind.” Throughout the trip, group members reaffirm this goal to each other, and it informs how returnees describe the experience to prospective pilgrims upon return. Because this narrative loop sets expectations for the trip, it is useful to expand briefly on these group dynamics here. Frank, the Polish-American Catholic I referred to earlier, voiced a sentiment typical of many pilgrims when, during a sharing session on Father Mike’s trip, he told us: “I feel so comfortable with each of you because no one thinks you’re a kook for loving Jesus so much. [It] makes such a difference . . . just knowing everyone at the various stages in their lives feels the same [about Jesus] and we can talk about it together.” Although this heightened expression of togetherness certainly contains elements of communitas, it departs from Turner’s original conception in some respects, mainly because it was not shared: most members of our group reacted by staying quiet during sharing sessions, or absenting themselves altogether.15

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Americans consider to be proper Christian conduct. Scholars trace these now-diffuse rules to Reform theologies filtered through postwar mainline Protestantism that privilege an individual’s private relationship with God. Many middle-class Americans have come to see open conflict as antithetical to being a “good” Christian: one cannot access God if consumed by feelings of anger or frustration with others.18 The stakes are heightened on pilgrimages, when participants metaphorically “walk where Jesus walked,” meaning that they try to be the best Christians they can be in order to draw closer to the Divine. The trip’s importance and its fluidity (one chooses it as an independent consumer; it is necessarily short lived) mean that although Christians (especially women) may be averse to conflict in other small group settings because they see it as a betrayal of their peers, in this case they avoid conflict because after saving up for this trip of a lifetime, they are simply not willing to jeopardize its success.19 As a result, nearly all pilgrims avoid potentially divisive subjects including, ironically, those pertaining to faith itself. Only two of more than a hundred people with whom I spoke described being disappointed when they were (politely) rebuffed after trying, in the words of one woman, “to dig deeper into the Christian side, like how [people] really feel.” Maintaining Golden Rules values means that pilgrims can focus on the group at a symbolic level. To paraphrase Durkheim, the group affirms and maintains Americans’ sense of moral self, becoming a metonym for idealized unity through diversity.20 Frank’s description of the people in our sharing circle as being at “various stages in their lives” reflects his wish for an American Catholic church able to retain younger members (especially his own son). Pilgrims on Pastor Jim’s racially mixed trip spoke of our group as the embodiment of an ideal postsegregation South, while well-off members on Father Joe’s trip described the group as uniting “rich and poor.” These characterizations rarely reflect a trip’s actual demography, which is usually quite homogenous. In Frank’s case, other than a woman in her forties and me, all twenty people in the sharing circle were within five years of his own age. Because pilgrims know very little about each other’s backgrounds, they highlight visible difference as a marker of diversity. Thus, ironically, they emphasize the trip’s potential to reverse social distinctions while reifying those very categories.21 People perceived as symbolically

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One trip and she was hooked. She has lived on a shoestring budget in order to return five more times with Pastor Jim from 2005 to 2012. She returns for a number of reasons, but one factor is her growing impatience with the pastor at her Baptist church in Raleigh, who, she feels, talks more about himself than about God. By her fourth trip, she had stopped attending altogether “until that man preaches like a preacher or gets on.” As a marginal person in her church—a single, poor woman in her 70s—Dorothy is unable to exert influence over whether he stays or goes. She can, however, exercise agency by absenting herself and acting as an independent Christian consumer: paying for a trip with Jim, a pastor she respects. Dorothy’s case, which is atypical since relatively few Americans return repeatedly, speaks to a larger pattern nonetheless. As a parachurch activity, pilgrimage is an opportunity for individuals to choose the group or pastor that most appeals to them. Once pilgrims have signed up, most companies or tour leaders send a list of preparatory reading, including the Gospels. Although they receive these instructions well ahead of time, most soon-to-be pilgrims begin only a few weeks before departure, if at all.22 In fact, when they describe “preparing” they usually mean a continuation of their devotional routine with the trip in mind; for example, reading the Bible before bed and, for Catholics, saying the rosary or performing the Stations of the Cross. Sometimes they incorporate physical training too. “I’ve put myself on a diet,” said Sharon, a 65-year-old Texan on Jim’s trip. “I don’t want to be the little fat woman trying to catch up at the end of the line!” Jill, a 68-year-old from Minnesota, walked the Mall of America every week for five months. In fact, the trip requires little long-distance walking, but by consciously setting aside time each day to walk with the Holy Land in mind, pilgrims begin to transform a takenfor-granted form of mobility into a marked, sacred practice. In the Holy Land, walking is the central mimetic act that they expect will engender a relationship with the divine.23 A standard trip costs between $2,800 and $5,800 and is paid for in installments over six months. In Israeli polls, most Christians list “economy” (or “other”) as their main motivation for going at that particular moment, meaning that they wait until they are satisfied they have sufficient money, which is usually drawn from a pension, from retirement savings, or from an inheritance.24 Single women may receive monetary

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Dave’s “little bit of witness” also exemplifies the narrative web that begins to take shape months before departure as pilgrims clarify the trip’s meaning for those around them.28 For women, this “witness” also includes asking others for gift and prayer requests, indicating the religious nature of the trip and the pilgrim’s commitment to others. In particular, many women collect written prayers to wedge into the cracks of Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, a Jewish practice that is now well known among U.S. Christians. It can even result in some surprising interfaith moments. Encouraged by her African American neighbors, one Catholic woman on Father Joe’s Raleigh trip went door to door gathering prayers from each family on her street: Jewish, Catholic, African Methodist Episcopal, Presbyterian, and “some kind of Baptists.”

“I’ve had my three score and ten”: Safety, Death, and Dying “Is it safe?” is the first thing that many pilgrims hear when they announce their intention to go. While some have postponed the trip for many years because of safety, once a pilgrim’s mind is made up, she generally shrugs off others’ fears. “I’ve had my three score and ten. I’m ready to go,” says 70-year-old Greta, consciously evoking a double entendre in which “go” refers to embarking on the trip and to dying. Faced with comments like these, it is often pilgrims’ adult children who are most worried or uncomprehending. Catholic tour organizer Liz Grinder routinely gets phone calls: “‘I don’t want my mother taking that trip! Where are you taking my mother?’ The mothers say, ‘I waited my whole life to take this trip. I’m ready to die after I do this.’ And [the children] say, ‘Well, I’m not ready to say good-bye yet, Mom!’” Charles Dyer, head of Moody Bible Institute tours, describes how grown children who accompany their parents to the airport departure gate sometimes weep and notes the response of their parents: “Worst thing that happens, [pilgrims] say, is I go home to be with Jesus.”29 At times, pilgrims sound almost flippant about death. When Esther, a 67-year-old Catholic from Maryland, announced to her family that she was going, her children were encouraging, but John, her daughterin-law’s father, had “a fit and a half,” as she puts it. “He said, ‘Esther you’re gonna get blown to bits!’ I simply said, ‘Oh John. I’m not going to get blown to bits. [And if I do] then you’ll come to my funeral.’ And he

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Dorothy know that there is no way to avoid the randomness of cancer, the “good death” ideal lingers, a reliance on a quiet resolve and an unshakable faith in God that can seem near impossible in an era when society prolongs the final moments of the terminally ill, often for years.33 The Holy Land trip bolsters belief and may therefore provide an extra layer of spiritual armor that pilgrims hope will protect the soul in case of bodily torment. In this sense, older pilgrims such as Ella and Dorothy articulate a theology of pilgrimage that is closest to how it was conceived before the modern period (and how many theologians still describe it): the earthly Jerusalem is a shadow of the Heavenly Kingdom, the physical journey in this life a microcosm of (and preparation for) the soul’s real journey ahead. Illness is scary, too, because it chips away at one’s independence. Women in the West are particularly vulnerable since on average they live longer and are poorer than their male counterparts.34 Dorothy is especially proud of her self-reliance after she told her abusive husband to leave. In the Holy Land, she even brushed aside younger pilgrims who tried to help her along steep sections of road with a curt, “Lemme go. I go where I want to.” At great expense, she has paid her way to Israel repeatedly, which she sees as a sign of her continuing mobility and independence. “Look, when you’re young, you go where you wanna go but when you’re older, people take you and lead you where you don’t want to go.” She says: I’m gonna prove my point. When a person gets old, society has gone so far out in left field [that] . . . when they get old and get sick—a nursing home! And [there] you’re mistreated. . . . I always told [my children], if I got sick I’d pick my own nursing home but then I’d silently pray to God to take me away before I got that far.35 . . . [Your kids] throw you in a nursing home and say, well it’s been nice knowing you and let us know when she’s dead so we can bury her. Or, nah, that’s too expensive, you bury her. That’s ugly to say but, you know it’s true! . . . They’s never thinking that one day they gotta stand before her again and tell her, Mama, I didn’t carry out your wishes because—But they gonna find out one day that [Jesus] is alive and well. And I been here to the Holy Land to get in line with the faith of Christ. That’s the way I know how to say it. To get it in line.

Dorothy begins her explanation with a version of the phrase she uses often, “I go where I want to,” her gloss on John 21:18, “When you were

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Middle-old women often couch the trip as one part of a transition in their role as caregivers. Some prospective pilgrims, such as Ella, talk about motherhood: “You think you could never be replaced in your children’s lives if something happened . . . so I think you confine yourself. I was really happy when they became a certain age and I could say, ‘I can really fly again!’” Other women describe the grieving process following the nursing and death of a loved one. While recent studies show that acute grief often recurs in waves over two or more years, this cycle is not generally socially acceptable; employers give only a few weeks’ leave and friends worry when the bereaved seems unable to move on.39 Esther, who joked about the potential danger abroad and is nearly always animated, became very serious as she described the years before the trip. “I’ve had deaths in the family and hard ones. . . . Both my parents died last year and my husband died [three years] before that and sometimes you say [whispers] I hope they’re OK. And I know they are sort of but—I want to deepen that faith a little bit.” The trip, which is generally undertaken a year or more after the death, is a time for pilgrims to confirm that loved ones are in heaven and that God is listening to their grief. Pilgrims in mourning are most likely to describe the trip as coming about through divine intervention. Esther recounts how her priest had been angling for a dinner invitation for a year before she finally had him over—the very day a cancellation opened up a spot on the trip. For her, this confluence of factors was a clear sign that God had heard her prayers for healing and was helping her through. While caregiving for children or elderly parents often makes women put off the trip, husbands are rarely seen as an impediment. Ella’s husband refused to accompany her, but she signed up anyway, unfazed. After all, she notes, she is the one who goes to church while he sleeps in or watches football. Like many American Christians, pilgrims believe that the gender imbalance at church (and on pilgrimage) proves that women are innately more spiritual. Consequently, they have a special responsibility for ensuring that others, particularly in their immediate families, have a relationship with God. Although pilgrims express it in normative terms, it is an understanding that has colored American Christianity, especially since the mid-nineteenth century.40 For Holy Land pilgrimage, it means that women may sign up alone but nevertheless tie the trip at least partly to their responsibility to pray for others.

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at Doug and I swear one day it was unbelievable. I looked at Doug and it was like looking in the face of Jesus. Really, it scared me! It was God saying this man is special to me and he’s the man for you because, you know, I thought I didn’t wait for the right one, [that] he really wasn’t the one I was supposed to marry.

Wendy decided against divorce. At her friends’ urging she began to rethink her role in the marriage: it was up to her to bring her husband back to Jesus. Doug, who was raised a strict Pentecostal, discarded religion as an adult and professes not to believe in heaven or hell. Despite Wendy’s new goal, the marriage failed to improve and she actually hated her husband at times. Five years later, she had an affair. She describes how in her unhappiness Satan came to her a number of times with temptations. She jeopardized her marriage and her relationships with her family, her daughter, and her friends. One of the longlasting effects was that Doug began to call her a “hypocrite”—not the true Christian she had believed herself to be. Wendy responded by becoming what she calls a “better witness for the Lord.” She did her best to stop judging others (lest she be judged, she adds) and started a prayer group for her mainly African American nursing unit at work. She threw herself into prayers for racial reconciliation, a cause to which she believes God has called her as a white woman in the South. When the pastor in Wendy’s prayer group invited her to the Holy Land, she knew she had to go. For a year she had been dealing with mounting responsibilities: not only was she working as a full-time nurse but she was also caring for her autistic grandson and had just nursed her father until his death. Although generally scholars describe elderly parents as a burden for female caregivers, Wendy’s father’s death resulted in more responsibility, as she found herself the de facto head of the family: “I think my family as a whole look to me now like the mother of everybody. It’s like I don’t have an option anymore, even if I don’t want to organize the Christmas stuff or deal with their issues.”45 Yet when we spoke before the trip, Wendy insisted that these challenges were unrelated to her decision to go. Because she believes that God arranged it, she says that she did not even pray about it, although she routinely prays about everything. She simply knew it was time. She put down a deposit for two tickets, one for her and one for Doug. “I

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a professional nurse and cares for her special-needs grandson. Still, she does not expect (nor does she ask for) physical healing for the child in the Holy Land. With a few exceptions, this is also true of Catholic pilgrims. Nor do Holy Land pilgrims generally seek personal spiritual change. They almost always specify that they are already on the right path, proven by the very fact that they are taking the trip. Rather than a “seeking” attitude, most pilgrims are characterized by assuredness. They might hope for a spiritual pick-me-up, but it is for others, most often their husbands, that they feel the trip might effect a total spiritual reversal.

“My burden to bear”: Going on a Group Tour to Be Alone Loretta lives three hours from Wendy in Charleston, South Carolina. She raised her son as a single parent and now, at age sixty-three, lives alone in a small bungalow. About a year before the trip, she gave up her house after her son pressured her to do so, worried about her ability to manage a large property. She is depressed enough about the move that she has not bothered to redecorate the new place. Not that Loretta is gloomy or inactive. She works full time as a prison guard, is on the Board of Trustees at her African Methodist Episcopal church, and runs all the educational programming at her church. Like Wendy, Loretta feels pressure to support an extended network of kin and friends, but unlike her, she sees the pilgrimage as a way to reverse this dynamic, which she believes is parasitic. Crying, she says, “I think that’s my burden to bear. I take on a whole bunch. . . . Even as a child—I think my first job I was like 15 or 16 and I worked because I didn’t want my mother to go on welfare. So I took care of my mom and my two younger siblings. I still take care of them.” Loretta finished high school and worked at a series of jobs, from barber to secretary to policewoman. She always wanted a university degree, so four years before she went to the Holy Land, she enrolled at Southern Wesleyan University. Night after night she did homework until two in the morning and then got up at 4 a.m. for work. In the evenings she went straight to church to fulfill her various obligations. She kept up this pace for four years and graduated with honors. She is proud of her accomplishment but also feels that “there were people that were against me or didn’t try to help me. Even in church . . . strangers helped me more than

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responsibilities. In Wendy’s case, these responsibilities were primarily family-related, and in Loretta’s case (at least in the months before the trip), they were primarily church-related. Both women provide what Wendy calls a “mothering” role for people who do not always seem to acknowledge the sacrifice they feel they make. For these Christian women (and some men), pilgrimage is powerful because it is a culturally acceptable excursion that provides respite from the immediacy of everyday frustrations while at the same time enabling the pilgrim to engage problems and work toward solutions by aligning with the divine.48 Implicit in this statement, however, is my assumption that pilgrims assert agency. This stance occasionally put us at epistemological odds. I peppered my interlocutors with questions about how they acted and reacted, did or did not make choices, and they, cognizant of the fact that as a nonbeliever I was interested in worldly events, obligingly recounted a series of situations that caused them grief and required resolve. Yet they balked when I extrapolated merely causal explanations for the trip. Revealing a logic in opposition, or perhaps at a right angle, to my own, they insisted that God had led them to go: Loretta heard his voice, and Wendy knew it was time. As the Bible says, and pilgrims sometimes repeat, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. . . . . He shall direct your path” (Proverbs 3:5). Increasingly, scholars of Christianity (and of religion more generally) are aware that while we struggle to make the unknowable gods known, religious practitioners might insist that, to quote anthropologist Hirokazu Miyazaki, “what is at issue is not so much the agency of these entities as the limits of human agency.” Thus, he continues, faith is best characterized “as the capacity to place one’s agency in abeyance.” This logic was especially prevalent with Protestant pilgrims steeped in a theology that describes the possibility of God’s sudden, dramatic intervention, most evident in the conversion to faith (being “born again”).49 Their insistence on God’s agency informed their stories of self, as Wendy and Loretta show above, and extended even to their descriptions of mundane trip preparations. Dale, the 64-year-old on Pastor Derek’s trip mentioned in the introduction, is a good example. Her daughter, who accompanied her, described how her mother packed and repacked in the weeks before departure, both nervous and excited about her first trip abroad. When I spoke to Dale separately, she insisted that it was quite the opposite:

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groundwork for interpretations that take shape more fully upon return each time they describe the upcoming trip to others. If couched properly, the pilgrimage is an experience that mediates participants’ personal desires for a successful marriage, a good death, or a happy life with how they see themselves as ultimately responsible for others. It is an extension, in this sense, of the dialectic in Christianity between interiorized moral self and collective obligation that is familiar especially to contemporary American women who practice their faith amid dense networks of relationships, yet also in a culture that greatly values individual experience and choice. As the time to go draws near, our conversations are charged with excitement and a bit of trepidation. We discuss which clothes to bring: “Can older ladies show a little shoulder?” asks Esther, joking as usual but also not wanting to offend. Others envision what the airplane might be like and talk about the new foods they want to try and those they already anticipate missing (“How can you wake up without bacon?”). They describe the photos they absolutely must get and carefully commit to memory grandchildren’s souvenir requests. In a flurry, they pack, purchase sandals with arch support, get extra medications, and cook and separate meals into labeled containers for those they leave behind. And then, after months of anticipation, it is suddenly time to go.

3 Feeling the Gospel Evangelicals, Place, and Presence

In 1928, as Protestant journalist William T. Ellis walked through the streets of Jerusalem, he was suddenly overcome by the “veritable presence” of Jesus as “the actual scenes of the life of Christ” “flooded” his mind. This “mood of place-consciousness,” he writes, is inevitable for any pilgrim who “in spirit as in body, treads these scenes sanctified by the feet of the Blessed.” Being in these particular places makes Jesus real and overwhelmingly present.1 In this description, Ellis’s travelogue drew on tropes already familiar to his 1920s readership. What is remarkable about this passage, then, is not its originality but the fact that Ellis’s “place-consciousness,” like that of so many Protestants before and since, raises significant questions about the very project of Protestant pilgrimage. Simply put: how can Jesus be more present in a particular place if Jesus is in one’s heart, not the material world? Believers—and scholars—have absorbed the idea that “Protestantism centers itself on grace, not place,” true to the Reformation’s iconoclastic notion that Christianity should be sola scriptura, sola fide, and sola gratia: by scripture, faith, and grace alone.2 Thus, studies of pilgrimage, from the Turners to the present, have largely ignored Protestant religious travel or have classed it as tourism.3 Since the 1990s, however, scholars have chipped away at Protestant exceptionalism on two fronts, paving the way for a more robust understanding of evangelicals’ relationship to Holy Land places. First, there is growing recognition that although Protestantism has a particular “problem of presence,” it is not alone. All Christians living between the Messiah’s first and second comings are faced with absence: the divine is present yet invisible; divine works are occurring yet often intangible.4 At the same time, studies have developed more nuanced understandings of the role materiality plays in Protestantism while also expanding 76

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the definition of what constitutes a “sacred place” beyond traditional churches and shrines. Influenced by these trends, studies of contemporary Holy Land travel have begun to recognize that even U.S. evangelicals are “saturated with notions of place and place meaning.”5 Yet to date no major study has examined this relationship in its full complexity, and the assumption remains that evangelical visitors have little connection with the material culture on site or one that is fundamentally fraught.6 Scholars and Holy Land guides pinpoint two major ways that evangelicals can decrease their ambivalence enough to view a place as “authentic.” They rely on verification by experts, mainly biblical archeologists, who date a place and match it to descriptions in the scriptures. A classic example is the town of Capernaum, which is mentioned by name in the Gospels and whose ruins archeologists date to the first century. Second, they gravitate to “open” sites, those with no Catholic or Orthodox structures that seem to hinder an unmediated connection with Jesus.7 While this characterization is (often) correct, it skirts what is most important to pilgrims themselves: a sense of presence—the feeling that divine or invisible beings are manifest (often mediated through material things) and engage in intimate relationships with the living. How people see and converse with heavenly figures is culturally dependent, of course. Protestant pilgrims most often describe being in relationship with Jesus, angels, and deceased loved ones, whom they may picture as, for example, luminous apparitions or a feeling of overwhelming comfort and joy.8 I leave aside here their precise composition and focus instead on the interplay between textual literality, “place-consciousness,” and this network of human and invisible beings. What becomes clear is that for evangelicals the Holy Land is not only (or even primarily) a visionscape, as is often assumed, but also a touchscape, a soundscape, and a smellscape.9 In short, “authenticity” relies on how places feel.

Travel Snapshot 1: A Cleaner, Quieter Tomb The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a complex of churches and shrines that was first built in the third century. Today it is located in the center of Jerusalem’s Old City. For the majority of the world’s Christians, the site is believed to mark the place where Jesus was crucified and buried. It is infamous for inter-sect squabbles, which Ottoman rulers attempted to

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era.13 As we waited, a young woman approached Helen and said, “English?” The group was wary and did not want to respond, thinking of the trinket sellers at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. But she handed Helen a paper lily inscribed with a biblical blessing and refused any tips, explaining that she was a Christian from Brazil. Everyone was very pleased with the interaction; it legitimized the Garden Tomb as a spiritual place (not “commercial”) and as a nexus for Bible-believing Christians the world over. Our Garden Tomb guide, a Scotsman named Ken, ran a businesslike tour, describing the tomb’s discovery and justifying its claims to authenticity. Like a TV prophecy preacher, he peppered his speech with biblical allusions and disparate bits of scriptural evidence.14 He repeated the five biblical “criteria” for the tomb’s location a number of times, ticking them off on his fingers: “What does the Bible say? It says five things: it was close to the city, it was outside the walls, it was by a busy road, the skull shape, and the new tomb. We feel all these criteria fit exactly.” Once he established the link between scripture and this particular place, he switched gears, catching the group off guard. Ken: I grew up with an image in my mind, and you probably did too, that Jesus was on a hill [when he was crucified]. . . . And there’s a garden where Jesus was crucified, right? What would the garden have looked like? Group: “Flowers, trees.” “Like this.” “Like the garden we’re in.” Ken: No. This is an ornamental garden. It wouldn’t have looked like this at all. So forget this. Likely it was an olive grove or maybe a vineyard.

Then Ken led us to the tomb site, and while we waited to enter the rockhewn cave, he showed us a third-century cross cut into the cliff above it. “Early Christians must have been here. Why would they come here?” He paused for effect, Maybe because this place meant a lot to them. But we can’t be one hundred percent sure, like I said. Anyway the tomb is empty. Again, we haven’t come to worship a tomb. We worship a living God. People sometimes leave beautiful flowers or notes to God. We take them out right away. Why? Because we’re not encouraging this to be a shrine. We

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for women, a number of the pilgrims were very moved. They prayed, some wept, and most followed the Catholic groups ahead of us by leaving a prayer request: “I pray for healing—body, spirit and soul.” “I pray for Chantal for healing of cancer.” “I pray for family and friends in S. Carolina.” Loretta was the last one out, carefully writing a request as she exited. On another day, we visited Mount Carmel, the Catholic site commemorating the place where, according to the Old Testament, Elijah killed 450 priests of Baal (I Kings 18). The site features a church and a pretty, shaded area where Catholic groups have Mass. Nearby is a large statue of Elijah, who stands with his robes blowing, ready to defeat pagans. When we arrived, Gilad referred to the Old Testament story, but only briefly. For him, the major reason to visit was the view. He directed our attention outward, facing away from the material culture on site, to the valley below. Using sweeping gestures, he recreated Jesus’ journey: “Look! See where I’m pointing? Jesus walked from Nazareth to Jerusalem in two ways. Through the Jezreel Valley right along there [tracing in the air with his finger] and through Samaria. He would walk there, there—do you see that town? It’s named Afula. Picture a little town like that and Jesus would stop through on his way to Jerusalem, just like where we go tomorrow.” Pastor Jim was clearly impatient and finally interrupted to offer an alternative reading: “Can I say something? Here, on this spot, Elijah waited for rain. It was one of the greatest tests of faith in the Bible. In North Carolina we’ve had a drought for a couple years so we know a little, especially the farmers [in our group], but see how dry it is here. Just really feel the heat here.” For Jim, focusing on the view seemed to negate the trip’s goal: the sensory, tactile experience of being where biblical people walked. He was not bothered by Catholic monuments; he even pointed to the statue of Elijah when he reminded us of the story. This pattern continued throughout the trip. When Gilad drew our gaze to panoramas, Jim, sometimes quietly and sometimes less so, disputed their importance. On one occasion, frustrated at yet another map unfurled at the front of the bus, he turned to me, “No one wants to hear this! You got to be a history geek to like this stuff. . . . You can tell he doesn’t love the Lord. [The pilgrims] want to be at the places but the guide wants to do this.”

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by Kurt Carr, an African American Baptist. Although most people in our group were Baptists, very few knew the song except for Loretta and Jonelle, two of the African American women, who danced and sang on the ship’s deck. Everyone smiled and was good humored, excited to be on the sea. After a few more praise songs, Jim stepped in and switched gears to a more traditional service that included the white group members. Sharon and Gwen sang I Walked Today Where Jesus Walked and Amazing Grace, then Jim began to preach: “Some people say, Jimmy, this land has changed so much since the time of Jesus. It isn’t the same. But this is pretty much what our Savior saw. This lake, these hills—and, if you have a prayer life, a relationship with the Lord, he’ll keep your boat afloat.” Then Jim followed a pattern common to many preachers in the U.S. South.17 He told three stories that were not explicitly linked but when taken together, tell us something about the message he wanted us to imbibe: a friend of Jim’s nearly drowned in his boat off the coast of Florida but prayed and survived; a mother mourning her child’s suicide told him, “Jim, when I see the place where my own blood died, I just have to cry out to the Lord and every time I do, I feel a great calm”; and, last, a businessman caught in a snowstorm in a Chicago hotel got bored, picked up the Bible, read it, and was saved. Jim ends, “I was saved in church service and I’ll never forget it. Probably most of you were too, but you can get that feeling anywhere. That businessman was never the same and I bet none of you have been either since Jesus was let in your hearts.” After the sermon, we pulled up to the dock to see the Jesus Boat. It is housed in a state-of-the-art museum filled with visual aids and videos detailing the scientific processes involved in testing and salvaging the craft in order to show irrefutably that it dates to the time of Christ. Somewhat incongruously, the museum also describes the boat as a modern miracle: when the boat was discovered, “a brilliant double rainbow crowned the skies over the Galilee. Extremely rare, many thought these rainbows and other simultaneous unexplainable events were signs from God, hailing the discovery of this ancient boat.”18 Whether or not Jewish staff members think that finding a first-century boat is indeed a sign from God, the message is clearly designed to appeal to evangelicals, the site’s main clientele.

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mother who had lost her child, a narrative that spoke directly to the group members, almost all of whom were mothers and two of whom were grieving a child’s death. Jim described how for the distraught mother, the particular place where her child died retained his presence—it was almost a haunting—that made her cry out each time she was there. The physical storm in the Gospels (and off the Florida coast in the first story) becomes an inner storm, the emotional turmoil she feels. The place where the child died never lost its sense of presence, but with God’s help, she was able to calm her anguish. By contrast, the third story, about the businessman who found God in a Chicago hotel, included a physical storm. The snowstorm mirrored the storm in biblical Galilee and the storm off the Florida coast, but in Chicago the danger was spiritual. The story worked precisely because of its setting, a hotel room far from home. Free from distractions, the man picked up a Bible, and in a traditional evangelical approach to place, Jim reminded us that God can transform the heart anywhere. Yet he ended with a paradox: while conversion can happen anywhere, it is likely, for Jim and his listeners, to occur in a particular Christian place, namely a church. Jim introduced the stories by acknowledging what American pilgrims (especially evangelicals) often fear most: the land has changed so drastically since the time of Jesus that it contains no trace of his presence. This worry gestures at an essential theological conundrum: it is the Holy Land’s imagined immutability that offers a tangible manifestation of biblical truths, and yet all material things and places, if one thinks theologically, are fleeting. How can both these things be true?21 Jim responded in two contradictory ways. First, he acknowledged this worry but assured us of the land’s stability. (“This is pretty much what our Savior saw. This lake, these hills.”) Then he interrupted himself and referred back to the primacy of an inner spiritual relationship. (“If you have a prayer life . . . [the Lord] will keep your boat afloat.”) The boat was no longer our physical worship boat (or Jesus’ boat) but a metaphor for Christian well-being or perhaps the soul. The stories of the sermon—which show how places of tragedy and places of joy are imbued with lasting presence, though God can transform the heart anywhere—wove multiple ways to understand place into a single fabric, much like the pilgrimage itself. As Jim spoke to us, he narrated but he also showed. Directing our gaze outward to the lake and hills that are “pretty much” what Jesus

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“That’s right! Now if we women ran it, we’d clean it up and make it nice!” Everyone laughed as she mimed sweeping up the crumbs that we had scattered on the table. Although she lightened the mood, Sharon and her husband Arnie actually felt just as strongly as Annalee did. At the Church of St. Anne, for example, they refused to go into the crypt or stay longer than was absolutely necessary, comparing it to a mosque or Buddhist temple—sacred to other (misguided) people but absolutely foreign to them. Many evangelical tour leaders try to soften these feelings. One member of a 1976 Dallas Theological Seminary trip recalled that his pastor told them, “Without the churches you wouldn’t know where any of the sites actually are. So I guess I felt grateful . . . to see them there.”29 This rhetoric can mollify group members while avoiding intellectual dishonesty; by the early 1980s, it was clear to many conservative Christian tour leaders and scholars that there was better archeological evidence for the location of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre than for the Garden Tomb.30 By giving credit to historical churches for marking places, pastors acknowledge that while evangelicals might not own them or feel God’s presence in them, they too benefit from their existence. This logic is most evident at the Mount of Olives lookout over Jerusalem, where guides and leaders use the historic churches (and the Al-Aqsa mosque) in order to structure Jesus’ imagined route: “Do you see there, at that white dome? He would have walked from there to where you see that steeple. Do you see that? And then he continued to where you see that church.”31 For some Protestants, these explanations do little to lessen their antipathy for Catholic and Orthodox places. Sharon copes by extending Dyer’s visualization technique at Nazareth into the primary optic through which to see the land as a whole. She envisions the entire Holy Land as a spirit-filled area where precise locations are of no importance and therefore the traditional churches serve no purpose, even as markers. Her mental map has no distinct dots and place names; it is a giant panorama scattered with winding routes, a place that Jesus crisscrossed continually. Often when I asked her what she had thought of a particular place, she responded, “He walked all over this whole area so I know that if I walk enough my feet will be where he walked.” So all-encompassing was this nonspecificity that she even connected it to sites that have no association with Jesus in any tradition, like the Israel

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saw or if she was asleep when we passed, she is left with frustrating gaps in her imagined recreation of Jesus’ trajectory. The static gaze at panoramic lookouts thus provides a crucial complement: it allowed us to catch up on missed sites and connect the dots. Aware of this, Gilad stopped us regularly, for example when Nazareth was visible in the distance: We went to Nazareth on the second day, remember? That’s of course where Jesus grew up. Now after that he traveled out along these roads. Do you see? Maybe you didn’t notice but we just came along there. And when he was twelve, his parents took him to Jerusalem. . . . We will be there tomorrow. They maybe traveled the road we just did.

From the hilltop, Gilad was able to order Jesus’ story—he was in Nazareth, then he went to Jerusalem—thereby imaginatively reordering our itinerary and connecting our mobility (“We went there”; “We will be there tomorrow”) to the routes that Jesus walked.

“If Jesus died in a place like where Mary was born”: Sensory Experience and Presence Panoramas are mediated from a distance or through glass. Calling this the “dispossession of the hand” in favor of the eye, Michel de Certeau characterizes vehicle travel as fundamentally about separation: “You shall not touch. The more you see, the less you hold.”37 While pilgrims have a less negative valuation, they do insist that bus travel is insufficient without tactile ways of knowing. They expect both the “perspectival (and literally pedestrian) mimesis of Christ.”38 If participants feel that the latter is given short shrift, they will occasionally dispute a guide’s reliance on panoramas, as Jim did at Mount Carmel. Interrupting Gilad, he brought us down to earth, focusing on the heat and the sensory experience of being there. Archeological places effectively merge sensory needs with more traditional evangelical methods of viewing. As described earlier, biblical archeology has exerted considerable influence in Protestant circles since the mid-1800s. In the 1970s, it was incorporated into the packages that tour providers and IMOT developed for evangelicals, and today Israeli guides still rely on archeology to distinguish “authentic” from

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Anne present differing but complementary corporeal assumptions: in the former she feels Jesus’ presence, his life “in ruins” as she has pictured since childhood; in the latter, where the architectural simplicity is like her Methodist church, she feels immediately comfortable, able to speak to Jesus and his mother through prayer and song as she does at home. It made no difference that the group that was singing was Catholic. They were Americans, the songs were in English, and she could join in. The familiarity of home places is an especially subconscious kind of knowing, made up of repeated experiences in which sights, sounds, and smells blend. Places feel “right” for prayer based on a person’s individual preference and on the culturally constructed landscape of his or her religious group. This spatial practice is so deeply embodied that pilgrims rarely feel the need (and are not always able) to express why they gravitate toward particular Holy Land places.42 These moments pose a particular challenge for scholars. As Morgan points out, we still rely on our “subjects” to verbalize their feelings so that we can translate them into academic writing. He does not suggest that we eschew this practice (which would be impossible) but emphasizes instead that we think differently about the moments when discursive reasoning fails. Rather than representing lost scholarly opportunities, it is a chance to consider other forms of meaning-making, including the aesthetic and the sensory.43 For pilgrims, divine presence is manifested most powerfully in two overlapping ways: in “home places”—those that live up to cherished expectations or feel like prayer places in the United States—and when a beloved part of “home religion” (usually scripture or song) is suddenly made more meaningful by its occurrence in the Holy Land. Anthropologists, notably Glenn Bowman, have described how home rituals are integrated into pilgrims’ experiences. What Bowman implies, however, is that pilgrims respond best to worship services that are the same as those they already know. In fact, the power of these experiences stems from how they are like home but occur in ways that pilgrims feel are new, unanticipated, and thus more intense.44 This is why, for example, Sharon burst into tears while singing the hymn, “I Walked Today Where Jesus Walked” on the Worship Boat. “I’ve sung that so many times,” she said, surprised at her own emotional response, “but this was the first time it truly hit me, we’re where he was!”

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Sights and sounds are crucial, but so is touch. Loretta wants to feel the sand between her toes. Part of this tactile experience is the constant exchange of objects at Protestant sites. At the Garden Tomb, for example, the Tomb Association daily removes the flowers and prayer notes that visitors leave behind in order to control what seems like aberrant behavior: creating shrines, worshipping rocks. Protestant visitors rarely harbor such worries. Jim’s group did not bring flowers (although some felt disappointed that they had not thought of it) but they took away rocks and leaves. Like most U.S. Protestants, they spent time at each site gathering physical reminders and then comparing their finds on the bus. Objects were valued less for beauty than provenance. Wendy and her friend Nolah, for example, collected rocks from every biblical place associated with Jesus and from a few sites popular with tourists, such as the Dead Sea. They ignored modern sites, but the only places where they pointedly refused to gather rocks were the towns that, according to the Gospel, Jesus cursed: Capernaum, Chorazin, and Bethsaida. Although Wendy laughed about it, she still felt “better not take any of that [curse] home with me.” Implicitly perhaps, Wendy and Nolah understand the rocks to be little pieces of place and thus vitally attached to the presence (positive or negative) at their site of origin.48 To make sense of their need to touch, evangelicals draw on biblical precedent. Wendy explained, “I’m much more of a visual learner or tactile. I don’t pick that much up just reading something. Like [the Apostle Thomas] who touched Jesus? Ya, well, I never doubted Jesus but I see what he did. If you can touch, you really know [Jesus] was real, he was here.” Other group members connected the need to touch with the everyday practices they use to feel close to deceased loved ones: visiting and cleaning a gravesite, arranging a dead child’s room. Being in the Holy Land also connects those two immaterial presences: Jesus and the dead. During our Garden Tomb communion service, Helen revealed to the group: “I lost my husband last year. But I really feel him with me here [so] I know where he is. He’s with Jesus.” In making Jesus’ presence tangible, she feels renewed confirmation that her husband is also present, living bodily in heaven and waiting for her to arrive. Helen picked up stones throughout our trip, like most of our group, and these gained particular significance for her at the Mount of Olives, when she noticed the Jewish custom of leaving pebbles on graves. She brought back her

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group members react emotionally through paralinguistic vocalizations, such as crying or gasping. Dehoney describes how during one memorable trip to Jerusalem in the mid-1960s, “a grey-haired grandmother suddenly shouted amid unrestrained joy and ecstasy, ‘Glory oh glory!’ And amid unrestrained emotion and free-flowing tears we did feel the presence of the living Christ in our hearts as never before.”53 Verbal utterances (of prayers, glorys, amens, and the name “Jesus”) are twinned with recognized paralinguistic expressions—such as tears in U.S. Protestantism—to create “an event which grips [the] body.”54 At these moments, the group, as a body, heightens an individual’s own bodily experience of the divine, and vice versa.

Presence and Absence: The Role of Visions For some Christian pilgrims, presence manifests in dramatic fashion: biblical figures appear and even interact with them. Although such phenomena are more closely associated with Catholics, they also have a history in Protestantism.55 For example, Roy Gustafson, who began the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association Holy Land tour program, credited a vision with bringing him to Christ. One day in 1922, when Roy was seven years old, he was sitting with his parents at a service in their Swedish Reformed Church in New England. Suddenly he saw the painting of Jesus at the front of the church begin to move. Before his eyes, Christ ascended to heaven, turning to him to say, “I will come again.” Roy immediately accepted Jesus and never forgot the experience.56 Since the first published accounts of Holy Land travel, American Protestants have described visions like Roy’s: someone squints and sees the retreating figure of Christ or crests a hill and witnesses the crucifixion scene.57 In Roads to Rome, historian Jenny Franchot describes nineteenth-century Protestant visions as a “bodily gaze,” a method of flirting with Catholic places and worship that safely indulges spiritual desire from a distance.58 In the Holy Land, perhaps because of the power of place, such visions can turn threatening, overwhelming the seer entirely. An “evil dream” is how one visitor, Harold Speakman, characterized his experience at the celebration of the Holy Fire at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. A New York Protestant, Speakman spent Easter 1923 at the church in order to see the thousands of Orthodox

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even that she existed. It crossed my mind that someone was trying to tell me something. People talk about seeing angels. The Bible says always treat people with respect because you never know when you might be stepping in with an angel  .  .  . . They say people has entertained angels without knowing it. Now every time we go to that Garden Tomb that’s the first spot I check.

Dorothy has not told her story much, except one time when a coworker said she saw an angel and Dorothy responded, “Well, I can do you one better than that.” Although she justifies her sighting with scripture—the Bible says “people has entertained angels” (Hebrews 13:2)—in many ways it is unorthodox. She claims that Jesus’ cross was erected in the Garden Tomb, whereas the Tomb Association says that it was nearby, and she describes how the INRI sign was hammered into a rock rather than nailed to the cross. Yet Dorothy insists that she is not worried that her peers will contest her vision story, an assuredness that likely stems from how dramatically the belief in angels has risen since the 1970s; 75 percent of Americans believe in them, and stories of encounters feature prominently in best-selling books and TV shows.61 Dorothy keeps her vision private because, simply, she feels that it is personal. The angel trend worries conservative Protestant leaders for precisely this reason: it is construed as narcissistic individualism beyond the bounds of the established church.62 Embedded in this negative valuation is gender bias, since it is mainly American women who encounter angels. Another way to think about Dorothy’s angel, then, is to talk about power. Strikingly, in Dorothy’s account all male authority is negated. No male angels appear, though Gabriel is God’s usual messenger. The male guide and the tour leader—nationally renowned televangelist Jack Hayford—are absent. Later, Dorothy shares this story only with other women: me, her co-worker, and a female friend. Her vision makes divine presence tangible while also allowing her to participate actively in its creation and replication.63 By recounting her experience, Dorothy becomes an expert to her female friends who have not been to the Holy Land. She also becomes the protagonist of the pilgrimage, the interpreter of events, and the recipient of inside information, displacing the men who are, in actual fact, in charge.

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to Rome or to Marian sites, the Holy Land draws American Catholics, like Frank and Janine, who are devoted, regular communicants but who are also Jesus-centered and scripture-focused. Many articulate the desire for a “relationship” with Jesus and idealize the first-century church as a model for Christianity.6 The pilgrimage is thus powerful for those who undertake it because it successfully mediates certain tensions in contemporary American Catholicism. It lies at the nexus of traditional devotionalism and Bible-focused experience, offering room for laypeople to negotiate flexible relationships with the institutional Church, reaffirm links to older generations, and ground their Catholic faith more firmly in biblical study, interpretation, and meditation.

Janine and Frank: Becoming a Bible People “We started a Bible study [group] twelve years ago,” Janine says, “It’s something our parents never would have done.  .  .  . Now I think I’m ready to be in the Holy Land because we’ve been doing Bible study for so long.” Frank agrees, adding that the inverse is also true; the first Holy Land trip he took in 1999 made him more committed to studying scripture. “I felt, having had that good experience, I felt and I still feel a calling, like a ministry, to pass on the value of studying the Bible. . . . So when I ran for Parish Council [after the trip], I said one big priority was introducing Bible study.”7 While the couple continued their original Bible study, Frank also began a new parish group. There is no priest present at these gatherings, just the “people of God” and scripture. Few Bible study courses or materials explicitly encourage visits to Holy Land places.8 However, in my sample of ethnographic interviews, 66 percent of Catholic pilgrims were involved in an ongoing Bible study within a decade of taking the trip, most within the two years before leaving. A separate 20 percent were daily Bible readers on their own. This is significant, considering that in 2002, a survey by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine concluded that only 27 percent of mass-going U.S. Catholics had ever attended a Bible study. A more pointed comparison comes from a 2011 study of middle-generation Catholics in the Raleigh diocese, where I also conducted research. It showed that, among people who attended Mass, only 11 percent “regularly” and 16 percent “occasionally” attended a Bible study (or other adult education). By contrast,

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Since the mid-1920s, Catholics have accessed the Bible through priests’ sermons and missals, books of vernacular scripture for the Latin Mass. The Catholic Biblical Association (CBA), established in 1936, produced the first New Testament translation expressly for American laity, which was promoted through a yearly “Biblical Sunday” in the 1940s and a Bible Week in the 1950s. The national offices of the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine distributed thousands of copies of the Bible across the United States and some parishes hosted study groups as early as the mid-1950s. Educated lay members of “Mr. and Mrs. Clubs” attended talks by CBA priests, the Knights of Columbus encouraged family Bible reading as a defense against Communism, and popular TV Bishop Fulton Sheen used the Bible regularly on his show.14 In the late 1950s, some parishes introduced the Bible vigil, a paraliturgical devotion designed “to make the parishioners more aware of the place and importance of the Bible.”15 Conducted in a church sanctuary, vigils generally included a ceremonial procession with the Bible, followed by a scriptural reading and a homily. Father Kilian McDonnell, a monk at St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota and a promoter of the ritual, wrote in 1960 that, “the Mass excepted, [the vigil] takes precedence over other forms of Bible reading: a Bible Study group, classroom reading, private reading” because it unites scripture and liturgy rather than privileging one over the other.16 Vigils, McDonnell implies, seemed to offer a way to mediate the nagging question of lay authority: what is the relationship between rites administered by a priest and scripture, once it was accessible to the laity? Vatican II more thoroughly uncoupled rite and scripture.17 It created a shift in interpretive authority that made more American Catholics than ever before reevaluate how they related to the Book that, for many of them, was a potent symbol of what made Protestants Protestant. Theresa, who organized Mike’s trip, recalls, “When I first opened my Bible to read, my mother said, What are you doing? Are you going to become a Baptist or something?” Cindy, a 64-year-old on Father Joe’s Raleigh trip, describes how, as a child, “I was always puzzled that my Protestant friends had Vacation Bible School and I was in the choir and we sang on so many holy days but I still didn’t know the Bible and they did. I wanted [more] than the hymns and order of Mass and so forth, but [the Bible] seemed to be theirs, not mine.” For decades, Catholic

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had changed significantly, even in conservative sources such as the Franciscan-produced Holy Land Review. By 1980, it included articles that described how the Holy Land “is not a pilgrimage like any other but a wish particularly in these days to return to the source, to rediscover the Bible.”24 For contemporary Catholics, the “source” is the Bible and Jesus, especially his life and ministry, although, as is evident below, his crucifixion is not entirely absent.25 This focus is particularly important for Father Mike and for pilgrims who are deeply affected by the often-demoralizing narrative about the American Church in crisis. Mike reminded us repeatedly: “You can go to mass every day for 25 years or 40 years and never know Jesus. That’s why we come here. We don’t come to live in the past. The present is a mess. Let me live in the past. That would be easy. We came here to live in the present.” The messy present to which Mike refers includes the precipitous decline in the number of priests and nuns and a drop in weekly Mass attendance from about 70 percent of U.S. Catholics in 1960 to 25 percent today. Especially for pilgrims from Boston, such as Mike, Janine, and Frank, the highly publicized sex-abuse scandals and parish closures have augmented the sense of crisis.26 When Father Mike says that we have come to “live in the present,” he means that the trip offers pilgrims a new present that deemphasizes institutional failure in favor of personal relationships with Jesus and the model of an idealized early church.27 Janine, Frank, and Father Mike link their pilgrimages (physical and metaphorical) to the postconciliar image of a pilgrim Church. Says Janine: “All my life I have been increasing my faith on a road to deeper understanding. Or I hope it’s always growing. I’ve been able to benefit from how [the Church] sees things now . . . how it grows with me, or I guess I grow because of it.” Janine balances a sense of personal responsibility for her faith with the feeling that she is traveling with the institutional Church, which is also progressing in faith (and thus, implicitly, has made mistakes).28 This idea featured strongly in Father Mike’s message when our group visited the cave where Jerome is believed to have written the Vulgate (Latin) Bible. It was this visit, in fact, that prompted Janine’s initial comment about “becoming a Bible people.” The Vulgate Bible is an ambivalent symbol since it was a vernacular text when it was written, yet is in Latin, which the pilgrims associate with the pre-conciliar Mass. Father Mike chose to highlight the Vulgate

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Some participants, even those who are scripture readers, dispute the dominant narrative espoused by pilgrims such as Janine and Frank. Ed and Nadine, a couple who traveled in 2008 with a tour group from St. Cecilia’s, have been doing Bible study for fourteen years, but they firmly disassociate this practice from the trip. Indeed, they see the Holy Land as a “tour” compared with pilgrimages to Marian apparition sites, such as Lourdes in France and Medjugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ed explains: “The thing about the Holy Land is that it’s so old. I mean, Christ was there a long, long time ago. Whereas Lourdes was just a hundred years ago so I can relate more to the visions [because Mary] was talking about issues now. And Medjugorje is going on now. So it’s a time thing.” Ed neatly reverses the logic of Jesus-centered pilgrims; whereas for them the Holy Land’s ancient sites create a palpable connection to Jesus’ ministry that provides a model for today’s church, for Ed these same sites create a feeling of detachment. It is the newer Marian apparition sites that speak to “issues now.”31

Paula: Spirit-Filled and Empowered I was in a Maryland suburb of Washington, DC, looking at my watch and thinking that I must have been stood up, when Paula rushed up, cell phone in one hand, iced latte in the other. A flood of apologies and explanations: one kid is taking driving lessons, another is at football, she was getting groceries for dinner. Younger than most pilgrims, 49-yearold Paula describes her life as “full mother mode,” although the last of her four children is finishing high school, so the end, she laughed, is in sight. Paula is also fully post–Vatican II; she was a toddler when the council opened. Though she acknowledges that she is younger than the rest of her pilgrimage group from St. Cecilia’s, she feels that other differences are even more pronounced: she is divorced and raised her children alone, she never traveled abroad or got a university degree, and she is in a lower socioeconomic bracket than most people in her parish. Paula is in a Bible study group but she understands scripture reading and the Holy Land pilgrimage differently than Frank and Janine. She calls these practices “empowering,” by which she means that, first, they demonstrate that she is powerful enough to make her own choices, and, second, they are a channel for the power of the Holy Spirit. Though she

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went through a difficult adolescence. He encouraged her to join the choir, which is an outlet for her strongly emotional, spiritual nature. Paula is now a cantor and sings during Mass. It is a role that defines her in the parish, gives her a moment in the spotlight, and, she believes, allows her to become something greater than herself. When she sings, she feels like the Holy Spirit is intimately present. I’m a pretty spiritual, intuitive type person and I used to fight it all the time when I’d be brought to tears during some of our services. I don’t know if you think that’s weird or not. Actually I don’t care anymore. . . . When I’m cantoring the Psalms, God actually speaks through me to whomever is listening and sometimes that’s when I’ll be choking up and just like, “Thanks God!”

Although Paula feels at home in her parish, she is dismissive of the Church hierarchy. It reminds her of her family: logical, unfeeling, and unable to make exceptions. She peppered our conversations with comments about the Vatican, defining it as “man-made” and thus fallible. “I think, there we go again! Man is screwing things up again. I guess I kinda look at Rome as the man part and the Holy Land as the God part. Rome was where it ended up after years of man’s involvement.” For Paula, the Holy Land trip represents the culmination of her struggle to be her “own woman.” She cries when she describes her parish friends and fellow pilgrims, whom she calls her extended family. This is the family that she has chosen for herself and it is significant for her that she feels safe enough with them to take the trip, her first outside the United States. The actual distance they travel is also symbolically important in the context of her personal journey, which she defines as a struggle to find emotional but also physical distance from the people who hurt her. International travel to a place that she considers both exotic and dangerous is affirmation of the brave and adventurous person she now believes herself to be. At the same time, it supplants past failures that have made her feel mediocre in the eyes of her family. My mom never went and my grandmother never went and she’s a pretty religious person. And none of my aunts, none of them have been. . . . I kind of feel like oh yeah! I’m finally the first in the family

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Paula’s way of being Catholic corresponds in certain ways to the therapeutic, narcissistic attitude that sociologist Robert Bellah called “Sheilaism,” a term that came courtesy of one of his interviewees, Sheila Larson, who believed in God but did not go to church and characterized her faith as, “Sheilaism. Just my own little voice. . . . It’s just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself.”32 Like Sheila, Paula has been to therapy, talks about loving herself, and relies on her own conscience when her views on divorce, for example, clash with traditional Church teaching. But Paula’s way of being Catholic is more complex too. As sociologist Wade Clark Roof has noted of Sheilaism, remarkably little attention has been paid to the development of “both highly individualistic spiritual quests outside of the church  .  .  . and deep experiential expressions of faith within religious communities.”33 Paula is illustrative of this second type. Her personal relationship with the Holy Spirit is intimately tied to rituals that connect her to her parish and even to the official Church: singing during Mass, taking communion, attending Bible studies, and going on pilgrimage. Even her discovery of spiritual communion came through a priest and thus was sanctioned by a Catholic authority.34 Later in the trip, Paula did receive communion from Father Brian, but she said it was greatly overshadowed by an experience that evening when she went alone to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. She went right over to the Stone of Anointing and prayed, though Father Brian had previously identified it as only “supposedly” authentic. “So I was one of those weird people,” she concludes, referring to the sense of divine presence she felt there. But she says it with a shrug. Paula has worked hard to feel connected to Jesus—he died for her personally— and to her Catholic community, the one she has chosen for herself. And as she sat by the Stone of Anointing she performed spiritual communion and felt what she calls “zap!” The Holy Spirit was present.

Kathy: A Miracle Baby Sixty-two-year-old Kathy has bobbed white hair and a big smile. She never married, though she has a long-term boyfriend, Francis, who also came on Father Mike’s trip. She was one of the better-traveled members of our group, having worked in Paris as a translator and teacher. She returned home to Connecticut and retired early in order to assume the

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Kathy, few pilgrims connect the Holy Land trip with healing miracles. Certainly tour guides and priests do not construct the experience this way, so Kathy’s pilgrimage might best be described as running parallel to the official script. Her interpretation of sites and events coexists with Mike’s and even occasionally intersects with it. Kathy’s Mary is not a “vengeful Virgin” set on vindicating conservative positions, nor does she hark back to the devotional era as more “authentically” Catholic.36 In fact, she sees Vatican II as a positive development that simply brought the rest of the Church in line with the practices of GermanAmerican Catholics, like her family in Pittsburgh. An example of Mike and Kathy’s interpretive parallelism occurred when we visited Tabgha, the site associated with Jesus’ multiplication of loaves and fish. Father Mike believes that miracles are not helpful in producing an active, moral people. Praying for a miracle does not get things done. Thus, his homily focused away from the miracle of the loaves and fish and on the idea of sharing and justice instead. “How do we bring this into the present?” he asked us. “Into our churches? Into our parishes?” Later that day, we regrouped for a sharing session. One pilgrim, Greta, told us how much she appreciated the sermon. “So it’s not a miracle?” I asked. “No,” she replied, “[I’ve] thought about that . . . and I must say that I worked with women with eighth-grade education and I agreed to all sorts of miracles. You cannot take that away from them. So miracles do offer something for those with little education.” Father Mike nodded and summed up the day’s learning points. “I don’t think we really communicate the person of Jesus enough,” he told us. “You really can get sidetracked by all the people in the Gospel who are part of the story, but he is the story. Like Mary, of course Mary, Joseph, and the apostles. . . . [But] Jesus is the one.” Following these comments, Kathy chimed in. She did not dispute or seem to be insulted by Greta and Father Mike’s interpretations, though she might reasonably have felt this way. Instead, she responded by steering the conversation toward healing miracles, normalizing her reading by incorporating other group members. Several of us from [St. John’s Parish] were praying for our good friend Keith [who has cancer]. . . . We found out today that he had a miraculous recovery. You know I told you about my miracle when I was a child and

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institutional Church tend to be flexible in how they define being a good Catholic when it applies to their own children. Esther, the 67-year-old from Maryland mentioned in chapter 2, is a daily communicant. She approves of Vatican II yet remains drawn to certain aspects of tradition. Describing a trip that she and her late husband took to Europe, for example, she compared the cathedrals to “our post-Vatican II churches [that] are just bare. . . . I think it was one of the most religious experiences. I felt churched. The incense was going. The candlesticks on the altar were a big as I am and the sun was coming in through the stained glass windows and it was a profound experience.” A few years ago, she was surprised and hurt when her 36-year-old son admitted that he had stopped going to Mass. After letting it sink in, though, she saw it differently: “My son and daughter-in-law are totally post–Vatican II and they see helping the poor as just as important as Mass and they are absolutely right.” Like many pilgrims, she identifies “helping the poor” as “totally post–Vatican II,” though historians note that the roots of this theology date to the nineteenth century.40 Equating social justice with a new way of being Catholic makes sense of her son’s choices; he has not fallen away from the Church but has imbibed new institutional priorities. She adds a second explanation, related to natural life-stage cycles: “It’s to be expected. When you’re young you have the energy for helping others and then you age, and [it’s] important too, [but] you help in other ways, pray more, understand the value of tradition.”41 Like Esther, most pilgrims acknowledge generational divides but do not see these as static. It is, she concluded, up to the middle generation to be “combination Catholics,” straddling the line between generations, understanding the good in both. On Father Mike’s trip, this way of being in-between was embodied particularly during the Stations of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa, a devotion where pilgrims walk between fourteen plaques in Jerusalem’s Old City that mark Jesus’ last moments. Given the group’s ongoing discussion about being a “Bible people,” I had expected that we would perform the new “Scriptural Way of the Cross,” a version that Pope John Paul II introduced in 1991 that adheres more closely to the gospel account.42 The two forms of the devotion are similar in that pilgrims walk from station to station and read prayers. However, the traditional

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medical clinic that the government had threatened to close down. The priest leading the ritual, who had fought to keep it open for the Hispanic community, intoned, “Jesus suffers today in all the sick who are not receiving proper medical care. The sick are among the weakest in our community and, like Simon, we are asked to help carry their crosses.”43 Since at other points during our trip Father Mike’s group had gone out of their way to meet Palestinian Christians and framed these encounters in terms of social justice, I had expected echoes of what Ashley observed in New York. However, not only did we perform the traditional stations without mention of Palestinians, but we did so at dawn when the usually bustling Arab Quarter was empty, lined with shuttered shops. Doing the stations at this time created an experience akin to what anthropologist Glenn Bowman calls “interiorization,” referring to how the English Catholics he studied shut their eyes at each stop along the Via Dolorosa in order to block out the “tidal wave of things”—car horns, vendors, etc.—that disrupted their imagined Holy Land.44 By going at dawn, we effectively eliminated all potential distractions and experienced the stations as set apart from the day’s activities. It was the only time when we were utterly alone, when the Old City streets felt and looked significantly different. It also made the Via Dolorosa a truly mobile practice. Our imaginative recreation of Jesus’ route was uninterrupted as we walked, not just interiorized when we stopped, as it was for Bowman’s group. Since most American groups perform the stations during the day and a weekly Franciscan performance takes place every Friday afternoon, it is helpful to offer a comparison. While many Americans are disappointed and frustrated with the bustle of the market, some members of Father Joe’s Raleigh group identified the ritual as a marked practice—a “highlight”—precisely for this reason. Amid Muslims rushing to Friday prayers and Jews completing last-minute preparations for Shabbat, the group bore a large cross through the narrow streets. Ken, a 66-year-old from Charlotte, North Carolina, recalled it, narrating in the present tense: The streets are filled with people going about their daily lives—shops, street people—and we just move along. People don’t block us but they notice us. And we walk very quietly and solemnly. [My wife] Cindy and I are very private people with our religion. . . . That’s the most public time

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Building on Michel de Certeau’s notion of “pedestrian enunciation,” scholars describe walking as a multisensory experience that gives shape to places, emotions, and relationships. Certeau’s insight was that pedestrian movements create “thick lines” where many people have trodden over time and that these lines are instrumental in how we imaginatively link places together.47 This is especially true of the Via Dolorosa. Catholics consciously seek out the thick line traced by those who came before: Jesus, the apostles, Mary, generations of previous pilgrims. And because the Via Dolorosa is linked to the Stations of the Cross performed in American parishes, pilgrims often also feel the presence of their grandparents and parents, the generations that walked the devotion with them at church. This is likely one reason why members of Mike’s group incorporated devotional practices at this moment that were otherwise absent during our trip: we held small wooden crosses and touched the stones along the route. Some women carried rosaries and whispered quiet prayers. Many cried openly. As Ken implies, walking rhythms change throughout the pilgrimage.48 With Father Mike’s group on the Via Dolorosa, our footsteps echoed in the empty streets and the sound—slow, halting—played a key role in engendering the mood of sorrow and emptiness we sought. A few times someone tripped and the group emitted a collective gasp: Was she all right? Yes, and we moved on, each time a brief moment of mimesis as we felt how Jesus fell along this path. We walked together, almost huddling, taking smaller steps than usual. We felt much stronger group cohesion than when we walked strung out along roads or walkways, each at a slightly different pace. Not once did Father Mike or our guide Yusef have to admonish anyone for dawdling or wandering off. At each station we stopped to read a prayer aloud from a handout produced by Creighton University, a Jesuit institution in Nebraska. Although in some ways the prayers reflected post–Vatican II changes (for example, Jews were not mentioned and not blamed), Mary still played a significant role, both when she meets her son and at the cross. The words gave her prominence in Jesus’ earthly ministry as his teacher and guide. Using language reminiscent of the announcement for the first American Catholic pilgrimage in 1888, we read aloud, “All his life, his mother had taught him the meaning of the words, ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord.’ Now they look into each other’s eyes. How pierced-through her heart must be!”49

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“Bible-believing” Christians or worse, losing a sense of their own religious integrity in the midst of vibrant evangelicalism. The pilgrimage, a devotion that is fully Catholic yet also intimately tied to scripture and to Jesus, is, as Father Mike puts it, a way to “live in the present.” The trip is thus an optimistic undertaking, an affirmation that middle-generation Catholics have the power to progress in faith.

5 God and Mammon, God and Caesar Commerce and Politics in the Holy Land

“Catholics don’t believe this,” Father Mike reminded us as we descended the steep stairs into the Orthodox Church of the Sepulchre of Saint Mary at the Mount of Olives.1 It was cool inside and filled with incense. In the darkness, hundreds of lamps and candles burned, reflecting light onto the gold and silver icons of Mary. Although our group did not necessarily believe the Orthodox claims about the site or the miraculous icon housed there, we were still clearly in a place of religious meaning, with priests and worshippers, chanting and candles. As we exited into the sunlight outside, we found ourselves in front of a large, dented car with the trunk open. It was filled with carved olive-wood crosses, manger scenes, and rosary beads. “Manger one dollar! Coca-Cola two dollars!” cried the exuberant seller, waving his wares as we filed past. “Well, there you have it,” laughed a pilgrim named Phil. “God and mammon!” Mammon, a Christian concept derived from transliterations of the Hebrew word for money, refers to the corrupting worship of wealth. Phil is, of course, joking. He does not mean to suggest that the Arab seller of olivewood souvenirs is somehow serving the “god mammon.” However, his comment is a useful starting point for a discussion of how contemporary Holy Land pilgrimage is complicated and enriched by the presence of what pilgrims often construe as distractions: commercial exchange and political conflict. Both feature prominently in potentially disappointing, even disturbing, experiences during the trip, moments that often arise during encounters with “others”—local Israelis, Palestinians and Orthodox Christians. As a result, when pilgrims talk about commerce and politics they are also negotiating deeply rooted questions about what it means to be an American abroad and a visitor in a place that is central to their faith. How Christianity interacts with money, commerce, and commoditization has been a topic of scholarly discussion since Max Weber, 122

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responding to Marx, posited that European Calvinists had spiritualized the accumulation of wealth. While scholars have produced significant work complicating his theory, they do concur with Weber in a general sense: Christianity and capitalism are not antithetical, and we cannot easily separate the commercial from the religious. Though we may blur this boundary, scholars of lived religious experience can never discard it altogether, since the troubled relationships between faith, money, and commerce speak to a negotiation in Christianity itself between the material world and the transcendent one. As the Gospels tell us, one cannot serve both God and mammon equally; the treasures in heaven come first (Matthew 6:24).2 Because pilgrimage sites have for centuries been meeting grounds that enabled commercial activity, they have posed a continual problem to this dualistic worldview. While reformist Protestants, like Martin Luther, are best known for criticizing and then ending pilgrimage altogether, Catholic officials have also struggled to control what they have seen as nonreligious, even sinful commercial activity at shrine centers, a worry heightened since the nineteenth-century advent of modern forms of representation, mass production, and tourism.3 American pilgrims have inherited these concerns. Yet they pay a fee to travel and may buy hundreds of dollars’ worth of souvenirs.4 Indeed, just as Phil made the quip about mammon, a number of people in our group began to bargain for olive-wood souvenirs and scarves. A major way that American pilgrims cope with this ambivalence during the trip and when they return home is to compartmentalize experiences as either “spiritual” or “commercial/touristic.” The former are prized, the latter downplayed and generally forgotten. Ken, the Catholic pilgrim who earlier described the Via Dolorosa, has gone with his wife, Cindy, on two recent Holy Land trips with Father Joe. He draws a typical distinction between the “touristic” and the “religious” when he compares his visits to the church in Cana, where many Catholic groups renew their wedding vows. The first year we went it was just very nice and very sweet and at the end the little nun offered us a medallion for two dollars and I wear it to this day.  .  .  . I’ll always remember it. This time we had to wait outside the [church] and two or three other groups came up all of a sudden and

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in a crowded Arab place where mainly older women with little travel experience are pitted against male vendors who are self-assured professionals.6 The vendors know this and they too assert a type of power— each time they outwit a tourist who pays many times an item’s actual worth. Occasionally the ambivalence that characterizes this relationship erupts. At one point on Mike’s trip, for example, an Arab teenager blocked our bus door, selling handbags. When our group leader Theresa asked him to move he yelled, “It’s my country! You move or go home!” and then agreed to let us board if we bought his wares. Cowed and upset, many pilgrims acquiesced. Nowhere are commercial encounters more jarring than in sacred places. As described in the previous chapter, a vibrant tourist market lines the Via Dolorosa. Liz Grinder, a Catholic tour organizer, speaks for most pilgrims when she says, “When I was growing up, I never, I don’t know why, pictured the people on it. . . . In photos and also movies there are no marketplaces. [Jesus] is on a dirt road and you’ll see Mary Magdalene or the woman who wiped the face of Jesus or whatever but you don’t see the crowds of people. And I think that’s shocking.” Israeli guides are trained to mitigate the shock by incorporating the vendors into the biblical narrative that pilgrims expect to visualize.7 Anthropologist and Israeli tour guide Jackie Feldman describes his speech to a group of American evangelicals: Look, many of you expect to find a peaceful, devotional path. But more than the sound of prayer, what you’ll be hearing outside is the sound of business. Now imagine what it was like in Jesus’ day. People doing their last-minute shopping for Passover. A group of Roman soldiers comes up the street dragging the bloodied Jesus on his cross. A sheep salesman along the way looks up at the cross and the sign, “Ah, another Galilee rebel.” Then he turns back to his customer [putting on an Arab accent]: “So. How much you pay for the sheep?”  .  .  . Now please stay close together and mind your pockets. There are moneychangers out there whose ancestors were in the Temple, understand?8

As a scholar, Feldman critiques his own discourse. By mobilizing longstanding Christian stereotypes about Jews and money but ascribing this unflattering imagery to Arab vendors, says Feldman, the Jewish guide

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echo of the Israeli pioneer described in chapter 1—is more acceptable than if Taybeh locals are acknowledged to be savvy global citizens who rely on international tourism and émigré remittance payments. Consistent with the self-made mythos, Father Abu Sahliya spurned charity, even as he reminded us of the Church’s obligation to support his community politically and economically. As Israeli and Palestinian hosts know, the interplay of these two approaches is important since it tempers many middle-class Americans’ distrust of the “undeserving” poor, who are seen to expect charity and offer nothing in return. As I explain below, the stigma of charity is further mitigated by the (newly imagined) centrality of Palestinian Christians in Western Christendom. Deservingness in this case rests on a spiritual tit for tat: Palestinians support Americans (or Europeans) spiritually by maintaining a Christian presence in the Holy Land, and in return, foreign visitors support them materially. Putting this idea into practice on the trip, members of Mike’s group began to consider it a religious imperative to buy from Arab vendors (whether or not they were Christians), linking this practice to their Christian roots and the social justice they felt Jesus would want. So strong was this narrative that it could even result in unnecessary purchases. The night we returned from Taybeh, Greta tried to give away the olive oil she had bought there just a few hours before. She did not need it and it was too heavy for her to carry. “I just bought it to support the Christians,” she shrugged when she ended up abandoning it at the hotel.

The Commercial as Boundary Marker with Other Christians “Ever been to a more unholy place in your entire life? I was shocked!” laughs Esther with her usual exuberance. A 67-year-old Catholic, Esther was earlier described as feeling “churched” when she visited traditional European cathedrals. Her reaction to the Orthodox-controlled Church of the Holy Sepulchre was less positive, to put it mildly. “Oh my God!” she began: It was dark and it’s all—all very Eastern, the decorations, which is not my taste whatsover. There’s nowhere to rest your eye. . . . When you go there for the first time you think, “Oh my god! What is wrong with these

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Nazzour, a Damascus-based stigmatist who promotes Catholic-Orthodox unity.14 Another pilgrim, Cheryl, believes she saw a sign in New Hampshire: “God must be telling me something, you know? There were two girls [in my town] who were killed in a car accident together, a Greek and a Catholic. . . . I pray to them to intercede for us for unity.” Most American Catholics, however, react like Esther. They rarely refer to the Orthodox Church as such, focusing instead on sensory experience. The candles, gold lamps, and semi-darkness seem to preclude the “peaceful contemplation of God,” as Esther puts it. When she uses the word “commercialized,” as she did in the quote above, it becomes a word into which a number of overlapping themes are packed: invalid forms of worship involving money, “gaudy” aesthetics, and a moralistic judgment about the value of certain religious practices. Similar issues crop up when American Catholics encounter their evangelical compatriots. A few days before their visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Esther’s group went to the Jordan River. Today, nearly all American groups access the Jordan through Yardenit, a kibbutz-run site that has a restaurant, changing rooms, and paved areas leading down to the water. Built by Israelis to cater mainly to the evangelical market, it can accommodate large groups of up to 1,000 efficiently; in the year 2000, it drew about a million visitors.15 The baptism trade is lucrative. The tour group pays admission plus individuals pay $1 for bathrooms, $10 for obligatory white baptismal robes, and $18 for souvenir videos. Pilgrims file in and out through a gift shop. Photos of celebrity visitors, all well-known U.S. televangelists or pastors, are prominently displayed. For Catholics, it is the most significant moment during the trip when Protestants are in the majority and the material culture on site is geared toward them. Visiting Yardenit is a chance to watch American evangelicals at worship, something few Catholics have seen in person. When the impression is negative it is often conflated with, and exacerbated by, the site’s commercialism. Ed and Nadine, a couple in their mid-70s who were on the St. Cecilia’s trip with Esther, recount: E: The Jordan River was like Disney World. . . . When I went [to the Jordan] many years ago there was just a little group of us and we went in and got out and nobody was there.

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allowing individuals to continue living (or traveling) together.19 Appealing to taste is another aspect of everyday practice for Golden Rule Americans who believe that good Christians should not feel—or at least not show—ill will toward others. As described earlier, scholars argue that this attitude reflects the postwar growth of Christian individualism.20 However, just as important is the fact that middleclass Catholics and Protestants have been in unprecedented contact with each other through ecumenical dialogue and, less intentionally, through the growth of mixed suburbs, rising rates of intermarriage, denominational “switching,” and the advent of Christian television.21 When they invoke personal taste in multi-religious Holy Land places, pilgrims echo how they mediate relations at home by distinguishing themselves from others without causing undue friction with their colleagues and neighbors. While we have thus far lingered on Catholics, evangelicals are in fact more likely to use the term “commercial” pejoratively. As chapter 3 made clear, most evangelicals are flexible in their interpretations of Holy Land sites, but it is helpful to listen for a moment to Arnie, earlier described as the “resident skeptic” on Jim’s trip. A conservative Baptist from Texas, he represents a small but vocal minority that is very concerned about commercialism. Once, as we sat waiting while his wife Sharon shopped for high-end Israeli body creams, he announced, “I know what you should write about [for your book]. Have you thought about the prostitution of the churches?” He continued, You saw all those churches running the Holy Sepulchre. It was disorganized, confusion. At the Garden Tomb, they told us where to go, segregated from other groups. It’s well organized, which is what you get when only one group runs it. If they hadn’t brought us to [the Sepulchre], I would never have gone. It’s highly commercial. It just tears my heart out to see all the tourists.

Early Protestant reformers, notably Martin Luther, believed that the Book of Revelation’s description of Babylon, the “Mother of Prostitutes,” was a clear condemnation of the Catholic Church (Revelation 17:5). Arnie draws on this long-standing anti-Catholic rhetoric to frame what he sees as the immoral buying and selling of faith at the Church

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the concerted efforts of Israeli archaeologists and marketing by IMOT.23 Caesarea Philippi is on almost every Christian tour itinerary and has bus parking, two souvenir shops, an ice cream stand, and a nearby falafel restaurant. The Roman ruins are outfitted with multilingual placards and a staircase to accommodate elderly visitors. What, then, does Arnie envision for Caesarea Philippi? A Disney-type theme park recreating the Roman city? In fact, for Arnie what could happen is not the point. The conversation about Caesarea Philippi was prompted by our visit to the Mount of Beatitudes, a site maintained by the Catholic Church. Although the site is primarily a garden, there are also Catholic churches, which to Arnie indicate “marketing religion” by Catholics to “push their point of view on others.” The idea of marketing or selling Catholicism specifically is offensive to Arnie because he believes it represents false belief. However, even more distressing to him is the clear imbalance of power. Although American evangelicals are a mainstay of the Holy Land tour industry today, they have no control over the biblical sites. “All these churches” marketing their religion, in other words, never include people with whom Arnie feels affinity. For many white evangelicals, especially those from the Bible Belt and areas of the Southwest, this is the first time that they cannot comfortably claim majority status or historical ownership, as they so often do at home. For Arnie, the shock of being Other is unpleasant, to say the least. What American pilgrims have in common across denominational lines is a rhetoric of consumption that accuses others of being “commercial” and labels their sacred places as “commercialized.” This pattern is noteworthy because scholars of U.S. Christianity have mainly focused discussions of contemporary commerce and religion on two factors: Christians’ consumer habits, and how Christian institutions make and spend money.24 During pilgrimage, the rhetoric of commercialization serves another purpose. It is directed outward and often has little to do with the actual exchange of money for goods, yet is an essential part of how pilgrims mitigate the ambivalence they feel about their role as consumers in the land where Jesus walked, especially at sacred sites that are clearly not “theirs.” In short, talking about “the commercial” in the context of others serves to reposition pilgrims’ own commercial activities as right Christian practice.

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Figures 5.3 (above) and 5.4 (below). An example of post–Vatican II Catholic architecture in Mesa, Arizona: exterior and interior views of St. Timothy Catholic Church, completed in 1981. Copyright Steven J Schloeder 1997–2010. Used with permission.

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buff-colored building materials.31 This aesthetic is now replicated many times over in the evangelical megachurches that have sprung up across the country. As Esther intimated above when she tied the “commercialism” of Orthodox priests to the “unholy” place they inhabit, aesthetics are intimately connected to ritual and performance.32 Thus, American pilgrims’ discomfort with Holy Land material culture often flows seamlessly into condemnations of Orthodox worship and behavior. Esther’s impression of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, for example, is that both the place and the people are an assault on the senses. You have to stand in line and you’re pretty much fainting because of the smell [of incense]. And people there don’t stand in line. It’s like Macy’s on a sale day. Holy Toledo! You’re trying to be polite but . . . you’re getting pushed all the time.33

Dr. Michael Vanlaningham, who organizes trips to the Holy Land for Moody Bible Institute, recounts something similar at the Garden Tomb and the Jordan River. He began in answer to my question about whether his groups ever interact with American Catholics. You can tell the groups that are not from America. You know, the nonEnglish speakers. The differences between them and us are pronounced. I remember one time at [the Garden] tomb, we were waiting to go into the tomb . . . and there were several [Eastern Europeans] inside the tomb and they kind of hogged it. They were just weeping and moaning. And I mean, not just sobbing with emotion but, in my opinion, just way, way over the top. . . . Another time, we were in Yardenit and this group of about a dozen Eastern Europeans walked into our meeting area. . . . They just started getting in the water. . . . And I lost it! To be really honest with you, I believe in playing by the rules and those people think nothing of cutting in line ahead of you. . . . I will go up to the leader and say, “NO. You will go back there! We’ve been waiting for an hour! You go [wait in line].” . . . And I guess that’s not a very Christian attitude but I just can’t believe how incredibly rude it is. And I don’t care if it’s Eastern European or not, that’s just rude in any culture. But in terms of American Catholics there’s no problem.34

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Jesus—chose to have it all start. It enhanced my fear of God, respect of God, love of God. This is God we’re talking about, not some humble man who walked on the streets. And I think we often put [God] in a box in the form of Jesus or Muhammad or Buddha or whoever and that trip put all that in perspective for me.

Our pilgrimage was Wendy’s first trip abroad and her first encounter with Jews and Muslims. When she describes seeing groups there for reasons other than Jesus, she is referring to people of these faiths as well as those we saw from Asia (most of whom were in fact Christians). However fleeting or superficial these interactions were, they made her cognizant of a global connection with people well beyond the confines of her particular brand of U.S. evangelicalism, leading her to reorient her prayers toward an all-encompassing God who should not, she says, be “boxed” into human forms. Wendy’s newly global outlook has roots in her home life. One factor is her new friendship with a Hindu doctor in her ward. Even Americans such as Wendy, who live well outside the urban hubs where most immigrants settle, are today likely to be challenged by encounters with non-Christian neighbors and colleagues.39 She greatly respects and cares about the doctor, so the fact that he may not go to heaven troubles her, though he has assured her that they are “on the same path.” She had been praying about this problem for some time when, struck by spiritual clarity in the Holy Land, she received her answer. By subordinating Jesus to an all-encompassing God, Wendy finally felt assured that there is a place for him in heaven (and in America too, perhaps). A second driving factor is her frustration that despite years of prayer, Jesus has not improved her relationship with her husband, Doug. Although scholars note that women who are dissatisfied at home “domesticate” Jesus as friend and partner, Wendy’s response is the opposite.40 She envisions a shift toward a global God, an omnipotent and in some ways unknowable force that is greater than the petty and the personal to which she has always pictured Jesus as being intimately bound. In fact, for a number of years before the trip, she coped with her marital difficulties by directing her spiritual energy toward the problem of racial reconciliation, which she feels put her issues with Doug into perspective. To that end she has spearheaded an interracial prayer

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concentrated at home.44 In this case, trash reflects badly on Palestinians, and although this guide notes systemic problems (“it’s the municipality also”), few discuss these details with their groups. Instead, trash becomes an object lesson that reveals Israelis’ God-given stewardship. An evangelical from Texas described how “[our guide] showed us the Jewish sections and the Arab ones were so poor and dirty. He meant to show how the Jews love the land because it was always theirs.”45 Guides and pilgrims who feel that Palestinians are suffering unjustly are likely to focus on the potent symbolism of trash as evidence of their plight. Ella, from St. Cecilia Parish, says, Well, you know? Whose land was it? And to be pushed—we could see the [Israelis’] barbed wire fences. . . . Not that Jerusalem is so neat and tidy, we were surprised at that, there’s a little trash. But you go over to the Palestine side [Bethlehem] and it’s really trashy. And whether that’s lack of money, culture, whatever, but I felt sad, that’s all I could say, I felt sad. I thought Jesus and Mary and Joseph were certainly sad to be in that place. They were shoved aside in a very poor place. So I thought of how they would have seen it that night, coming into Bethlehem, such a poor place and being pushed aside, pushed aside.46

For Ella, Holy Land trash is a material metaphor for being thrown away, pushed aside. She superimposes the Holy Family’s biblical story onto contemporary Palestinians, who are still pushed aside in Bethlehem, and though she gives two possible reasons for the trash—lack of money or Arab culture—she ultimately decides that it is the former, because of Israeli persecution. Thus, for Ella, Palestinian areas may be “trashy,” but it is not out of a lack of respect or love for the land. After all, she asks rhetorically, whose land was it? Some guides attempt to deflect “trash talk.” When Pastor Derek’s evangelical group noted the refuse piled up in Palestinian areas of Nazareth and East Jerusalem, their guide, Isaac, waved it off as merely “cultural” and therefore unrelated to moral worth. When group members returned home, they still struggled with this response. Dave and I discussed it at length. “I’m thinking, if I lived there, I would be up picking up all of this crap!” he said, “But they leave it. Isaac says it’s a cultural thing [so] they don’t even notice it.” I replied, extrapolating from what

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making their presence known by the material traces they leave behind. Underpinning this frustrated sense of ownership is a moral core. Holy Land locals seem not to open their Bibles, says Sam, and Mexicans seem unable to comprehend that the United States is God’s land, adds Helen. Comments like these draw on long-standing cultural/moral frameworks that pilgrims understand as common sense: respectable, deserving people “keep up” their property. Thus, when pilgrims (and others) blame Arabs or Mexicans for trash, they feel that their behavior reflects their inability to be a number of things: white, American, modern, respectful. But just as importantly, pilgrims’ “trash talk” reflects their attempt to voice personal claims on deeply meaningful but shared places in both Israel and the United States.

God and Caesar: Making Sense of Holy Land Politics Christians have always pondered the line between that which is rendered unto Caesar and that which is rendered unto God.49 The link between Christianity and politics is of the utmost importance in Holy Land tourism, since IMOT, U.S. ministries, lobby groups, media, and, not least, scholars pay close attention to Israel’s Christian Zionist allies. There is some irony here. Whereas academic work on other pilgrimages routinely leaves out Protestants, that group dominates studies of the contemporary Holy Land because of their politics. Yet this is the very reason they are rarely considered “proper” pilgrims by scholars and by IMOT, which, until 2010, classed most evangelicals as “tourists” in official surveys.50 In brief, American Christian support for Israel relates to geopolitics and to the sense that Jews are “like” Christians because they have “Western values,” whereas Muslim Arabs do not. Premillennialist Protestants also believe that the existence of Israel (and the ongoing conflict) will lead to the fulfillment of the Bible’s messianic promise.51 For local actors, the main issues at stake in Israel-Palestine are land control and sovereignty (and thus security) related to four sites: the “West Bank” (which was under Jordanian control from 1948 to 1967), the Gaza strip bordering Egypt, the Golan Heights bordering Syria, and the city of Jerusalem. Tanya, a member of Pastor Derek’s group, can be classed as a Christian Zionist, although like most grassroots evangelicals she does not use the term. Now fifty-eight years old, she grew up Catholic but was

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oriented perspectives are almost always either unconsciously revised (Israelis become Palestinians) or are ignored altogether. In this sense Tanya is typical. But she is also rather exceptional. Although thus far studies of American Christian tourism in Israel have focused almost exclusively on Christian Zionists like Tanya, they are in fact outliers demographically.53 Most evangelical visitors who reflexively assert that Israel is “right” do so because they see it as a political extension (an ally) of the United States, as a means of placing themselves socially (as “liberal” or “conservative” in the bipartisan world of American politics), and because they are philosemites who believe that Judaism connects them to Jesus and thus with their spiritual “roots.”54 It is in this last context that they refer back to God’s promise to bless those who bless Israel, and this is why they are drawn to a grab bag of Jewish culture—Passover Seders, Hasidic men, Israeli folk dancing, falafel, the Hebrew alphabet—rather than to politics or eschatology per se. Of the eighteen people with whom I spoke from Pastor Derek’s group, for example, only two showed significant interest in the End Times.55 Dale, a 64-year-old in the same group, is typical of this brand of cultural philosemitism. Uncomfortable in the ethnic Catholicism of her French Canadian family, she found new roots in “Bible-believing” evangelicalism, which she believes is closest to the true church as Jesus conceived it. In Israel she bought a Star of David pendant. “I thought that really kind of just tells the whole story of who I am,” she explained. “Of our Jewish background.” I asked her for clarification: H: The Star of David feels connected to your heritage as opposed to, you don’t think of it as a symbol of Jewish culture, or the Jewish state? D: Right. That’s how I feel. H: It’s a, it’s a really personal symbol? D: It is. Very personal. It’s just like the whole line. The whole line of who I am and where I came from as a Christian. And why Israel is so important to us. And why—it’s just amazing. And why we all have to protect it.

Philosemitism has skyrocketed among American evangelicals since the 1980s, and more research is needed in order to clarify exactly why. The theological and political changes I outlined in chapter 1 are an

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part of this fallen world. I feel bad for the people living there, what they have to go through, but it’s not related to what I’m looking for.” Because of this attitude, most pilgrims, Protestant and Catholic, deftly steer conversations away from the topic almost immediately. From the vantage point of more than twenty years’ experience, Pastor Derek notes that women are especially likely to do this, an observation that was borne out in my interviews: men accounted for most of the 20 percent of my respondents who expressed interest in Israel’s political history.59 Loretta, the African American Methodist on Jim’s trip, demonstrated how many pilgrims make sure that politics do not overwhelm their spiritual goals. We sat together as our group drove through the Golan Heights. Our guide, Gilad, described the Syrian-Israeli conflict at length. When I asked her what she thought, Loretta shrugged: she could not hear Gilad well and it was “just politics.” When I pressed her, she replied, “I just feel for the children, they’re lambs of God.” This two-pronged response is typical. First, she ignored the guide’s speech altogether, a favorite strategy since it is easy and avoids potential friction with other group members. However, because I inquired directly, she was forced to respond, which she did by diluting the details of this particular, localized conflict within a moral framework that was so broad as to seem uncontestable: the innocence of child victims. At other moments pilgrims refer in analogous ways to the inescapability of human brutality (“They’ve been at war for 3,000 years or 10,000 years and they’ll probably be at war for another ten. . . . It’s a sad fact of humanity.”) or an ethic of tolerance (“People’ve got to learn to live together.”). This attitude can frustrate Israeli and Palestinian guides, who sometimes criticize pilgrims as “not interested” and too “uneducated” to understand the politics they try to explain.60 At stake are two competing realities. Guides seek to expose the reality of the conflict—how locals understand it and live it—in order to win support from Americans but also because they understandably see that reality as essential to the place. While many pilgrims express regret that they did not meet more local people, they insist that this does not mean more politics. The whole point of the trip, they emphasize, is to make the reality of Jesus’ presence distinct, which is too often obscured by “worldly” concerns at home.61 Gender also affects how women such as Loretta respond. This is an important point to bear in mind for scholars who criticize Christian

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You can say “us” [American Catholics] or “them” [Arab Christians] like we’re separate. Yusef said Americans interfere. But it’s all of us, not “them.” I was in the [army] service—you were too, right?—when it was segregated and you just do what, you know, you are told it’s “them.” We say the Eucharist is for all of us. . . . You wonder what it would be like if we were better.

Thomas, a retired priest in his mid-80s, raises significant questions about empathy and intervention. As the barely eighteen-year-old son of Irish immigrants, Thomas enlisted in the U.S. army. In retrospect he wonders how he could have served in a segregated army and been unable to see that African American soldiers were part of the “us.” He compares this failure to speak out against systemic injustice with our visit to Bir’am: faced with the ruined homes of Yusef ’s family, what should one do? Through the Eucharist, says Thomas, Americans and Palestinians are united as Christians and, more expansively, as human beings. But as humans, we all sin. What, he asks, would it be like if we were better? One reason that Thomas struggles with the question of U.S. intervention is that our Palestinian hosts voiced clear ambivalence about the issue. As he notes, Yusef repeatedly condemned Americans for interfering. He told us from the first day, “Americans think about things on the surface only. Don’t want to go deep—just the surface.” In Taybeh, Father Abu Sahliya said, “You come to share our difficult time for one week but you live in five star hotels and eat excellent food.” Elias Chacour, the Greek Melkite archbishop of Galilee and a well-known Palestinian activist, grew up with Yusef in Bir’am. He told us, “You cannot know the Bible without us [the Holy Land Christians]” and then recounted a story about how he attended a Protestant Bible study group on a visit to the United States. When the women began discussing Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, he replied, “Well, good luck but you will not do well. He lived next to me, not by some American. He wrote in my Semitic language, not in your American slang.”65 Few pilgrims saw these interactions as insulting. Instead, like Thomas, most responded by focusing discussions away from their American identity and onto their role as Christians instead. When pilgrims deplore discrimination against “the Palestinians,” they are speaking generally, but in essence they mean Palestinian

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to the land is grounded in a spiritual link to Jesus. American Catholics also often imply that today’s living stones—Palestinian Christians—are descended directly from biblical ones, Jesus’ early followers. In this historical imaginary, Holy Land Christians are “indigenous,” neither Roman gentiles nor Jewish converts per se but immutably present since the time of Christ. Arab Christian emigration is therefore profoundly distressing to pilgrims who believe that a geographic-spiritual-genetic link to the early church is being irreparably fractured. The loss is made personal for American Catholics because they nurture a connection to Holy Land Christians emotionally through prayers on their behalf, through charitable donations, and through a mystical relatedness in the Body of Christ.71 Pilgrims do not discuss the fact or are unaware of the fact that most Palestinian Christians are Orthodox, which means that they are not part of the Eucharistic Body as conceived by the Church. But whether they are officially in communion is of little import. What pilgrims seek is an imagined link with “indigenous” believers, which ties Americans to, as they put it, the “birthplace of our religion” and the “roots of our faith.”72 Holy Land Christians also have symbolic value as living symbols of Christological suffering. A typical Franciscan newsletter describes how despite Israeli persecution, “the Palestinian Christians do not hate. They refuse to teach their children to hate.”73 Portrayed as innocent victims and paragons of forgiveness, Christians seem to occupy a unique role in the conflict. During a group sharing session on Mike’s trip, a pilgrim named Markos vocalized this feeling: “Christians are like the oil between Muslims and Jews to keep the peace. A faith that believes in sacrifice, mercy. The presence of Christians here is a necessary one because peace will only be accomplished by people who know Jesus, who love like Jesus.” Being the “oil” can be physical. Markos’s comment was prompted by our visit to Taybeh village, a geographic buffer between Muslims and Jews. Mainly, though, he points to something less tangible: mercy, love, and sacrifice. If asked directly, none of the pilgrims in Mike’s group would say that Jews and Muslims lack these qualities, but by rhetorically excluding them, they accord local Christians (and perhaps even American visitors) a unique role in facilitating solutions without holding them

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victims they should feel empathy for the oppressed. In Mike’s telling, Jewish victimhood is further distinguished from the Palestinian experience of loss because Israeli Jews are fettered, and thus embittered, by the historical millstone of the Holocaust while the Palestinian memory of nakhba (disaster) remains current. Partly, Americans like Mike refer to ongoing social and economic inequalities, where Palestinians remain at a clear disadvantage. However, there is also an important theological undertone: refracted through the Gospels and merged with the biblical narrative of the Holy Family’s flight, the 1948 story of Yusef the refugee becomes part of an everlasting, still-relevant truth. Mike’s logic, which is emblematic of wider discussions among proPalestinian Christians, has clear inconsistencies. More problematic, these interpretations may reiterate an unacknowledged replacement theology because they often rely on New Testament stories of persecution, pacifism, and universalism in order to supplant the Jewish Bible’s particularism, especially God’s covenant with the Israelites that raises them above other nations. Unwittingly, pro-Palestinian Christians replicate but invert the Christian Zionist model (which is equally debatable in its obsession with covenantal particularism) by drawing only on biblical passages that bolster their understanding of the Gospels. Though they are at ideological odds, each theology shares the tendency to define what Jews ought to think or do (“It’s time for turning the other cheek”) without acknowledging its Christian bias.76 If Jews are oppressors (or merely flawed), the role of Muslims is even more difficult for pro-Palestinian pilgrims to ascertain. Following influential Christians such as Father Chacour and Father Sabbah, the American Catholic media has since the late 1990s more regularly portrayed Muslims and Christians as cooperating and as “suffering side by side.”77 For local Christian actors, this understanding reflects demography—realistically they must build coalitions with the Muslim majority—and the advent of a Palestinian movement that seeks to create a national rather than an Islamist consensus. Decoupling “Islam” and “Palestinian” has the added benefit of bolstering Western support, as Palestinian activists who promote the nationalist cause for European and American media are aware. Many Christian pilgrims who sympathize with the Palestinians also fear or dislike Islam. Certainly, they are hard pressed to fully accept Muslims as patient, forgiving victims; images of Palestinian militants,

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expressed the usual regret that Christian sites are becoming mere “museums,” Mike added a twist: the presence of Holy Land Christians is not the only solution. Our group, as American Catholics, can bring the spirit too.

Evangelicals and Messianics: Living Stones Reimagined Although they do not use the term as frequently as Catholics and mainline Protestants, evangelicals have also adopted “living stones” as a marker of imagined indigeneity, a physical link to the land and a genetic-spiritual connection to Jesus. But for evangelicals it is not Palestinians who embody these links, it is Israeli Messianic Jews. Messianic Judaism is an American-based movement that coalesced in the late 1960s. Influenced by the formation of the State of Israel, the new acceptance of Jews into the American mainstream, and 1960s racial pride movements, people of Jewish descent worshipping in Protestant churches began to see their rightful identity as “fulfilled” Jews rather than as converts to Christianity. The movement spread and began to attract new members. Although Messianic Jews claimed a place as part of the Jewish people, both the Israeli state and American Jewry (which, ironically, was influenced by many of the same historical and ideological trends) made it clear that Judaism was incompatible with Jesus. As described briefly earlier, Israeli laws in the 1960s and 1970s were amended to specify that Jewish believers in Jesus could not immigrate to the country as Jews under the “law of return.” Within evangelical circles, however, Messianics were increasingly recognized as fully Jewish. By the mid-1980s, conservative Christian magazines regularly quoted them instead of “nonbelieving” Jews in articles about Israel or Christian-Jewish dialogue.80 Some evangelicals have been openly critical of this trend. David Rausch, a former professor at Ashland Theological Seminary, has written about his dismay when a colleague counseled him to ask Messianic Holocaust survivors to speak to his class because they give more “uplifting” testimony than “unrepentant” Jews.81 For Holy Land tour professionals, however, the popularity of Messianics is a boon. Jewish Israelis rely on Messianic symbols to market souvenirs to evangelicals: music, like the “From the Bible for Revival” CD described in chapter 3, or items with the “Messianic symbol” (a Jesus fish intertwined with a Star of David and the Menorah). Since the 1970s,

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since they do want to cause offense or violate cultural norms. Experienced leaders such as Pastor Derek even warn their groups not to “bug” the guides about faith. Shirley’s explanation offers a way out by alleviating the need to proselytize directly. Just by being believers, she says, American pilgrims embody the rational proof that fosters conversion. There is a parallel here with the question Father Mike’s group posed about their role as short-term visitors. In both cases, U.S. Christians become active players in the Holy Land by bringing “the spirit” to local people and places. In this context, it is often impossible for Jewish guides to clarify where they stand religiously. Reflecting on his years as a guide, Jewish anthropologist Jackie Feldman describes performing Judaism—praying openly at the Wailing Wall, for example—even though the practice did not correspond to his “secular” Jewish identity and made little impact on the groups he led.85 Pastor Derek’s group noted that their guide, Isaac, also prayed at the Wailing Wall, absented himself during communion, and never read from the New Testament. While Isaac performed Judaism, the group refracted his actions through a Messianic lens: he was either “acting” Jewish in order to avoid persecution or he was engaging in cultural rituals that were perfectly appropriate for Jewish believers in Christ. Derek’s group listened carefully to Isaac’s language for clues about his faith: “Isaac didn’t say this is where you believe or people say Jesus did that miracle. He said this is where Jesus did it.” Evangelicals believe that words are a testimony of faith and thus it is illogical that someone would remain an unbeliever when he hears “rationally” every day from those who love the Lord. Further, because guides like Isaac speak the language of faith, it seems evident that they have crossed the membrane between conviction (listening to the gospel) and being saved (speaking the gospel).86 Catholics differ from evangelicals on this point, which is one reason they rarely mistake Jewish guides for Christians (and are thus more likely to complain that guides “fake it” and lack religious integrity). Feldman acknowledges the difficulty involved, concluding that guides are aware that they must engage in a certain amount of “fabrication” because “part of what they perceive of as their religious (or atheistic) truth must be suppressed for the pilgrimage to function smoothly.”87 Two days into Pastor Jim’s trip, as is often the case, the pilgrims began whispering about whether Gilad was a believer; it took them four more

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practice, self and the Other. In the process, pilgrims reaffirm their identity as good Americans and, importantly, as faithful Christians. In many ways, politics is more vexing. Sacred geographies are contested as material places are “appropriated, possessed and owned” by people with competing interests.89 Western pilgrims do not seek political control of the Holy Land, of course. Gone are the days of crusades, colonies, and mandates. In the broadest sense, though, geographies are not just territorial but also ideological and cosmological maps: pilgrims want to experience belonging in a place that is central to their identity.90 As a result, while most American pilgrims work to tune out or dismiss conversations that they deem to be overtly political, they still find ways to speak in a moral register about local people’s claims to the land: Israelis and Palestinians, of course, but also Orthodox Christians (or Catholics) at sacred places. Americans judge behavior and values based on the presence or absence trash, for example, or “gaudy” church decoration. Construed by pilgrims as common sense and not requiring specialized knowledge, these sorts of conversations allow for broad political participation, though not of the direct political or prophetic sort that outside observers may expect. When Israeli-Palestinian land claims are incorporated successfully into religious narratives, it can provide one of the most powerful ways for American visitors to harmonize their outsider status with their yearning to belong as Christian insiders. Pilgrims often voice this feeling using arboreal metaphors: “The living stones are the roots of our faith” or “We are grafted onto the Jewish people.”91 By nurturing imagined (and sometimes real) links to Israelis, Messianic Jews, or Christian Palestinians, American outsiders situate themselves as part of a lineage that is sustained by and sustains the land, extending back to the earliest Christians and even to Jesus himself.

6 The Long Voyage Home Transformation and Rituals of Return

Connie describes her pilgrimage two years ago as a fluke. There just happened to be a spot open, so she signed up. As she elaborates, however, she begins to contextualize it as the culmination of a series of events. Connie grew up in a working-class Irish Catholic family in Queens, New York, and moved to Boston when she married. Now sixty-two years old, she works full time as a nurse and cares for her grandchildren. She is chatty, energetic, and up on the latest fashion trends, even sporting a little rose tattoo on her ankle. Though she remains cheerful, Connie has in fact been through a decade of ordeals. “I had young people die on me [at the hospital],” she says, “and I hated God for that. I was diagnosed with breast cancer and another tumor and I had surgery in my eyes. I had so much crap and then I got divorced and it’s been up and down, up and down. But now I’m in a comfortable place—and the Holy Land was the push.” Connie had been yearning for transformation for some time before she happened upon the trip. “Masada,” she says, “was one of the highlights. I was going around saying to myself for a whole year [before I heard about the pilgrimage], if I can convince myself to be a better Catholic and a better Christian, I would go to the highest point on earth and yell out, ‘Jesus, I love you!’ It sounds corny but I felt like I could just soar. And I did it!”1 She returned home with a sense of urgency, wanting to soak up as much as possible to bolster her faith. She stays up late, sometimes all night, reading books about religion. And although she was already providing care and support for her siblings and children, she now takes on more responsibility at church: as a wedding coordinator and a Eucharistic coordinator, as a Catholic Christian Doctrine (CCD) teacher, and as a volunteer at the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. She characterizes her spiritual awakening as “something that takes up all of myself.” 160

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Often, it is after pilgrims return that they most clearly confront the dynamic tension between global travel and reships at home, a tension that is also bound up in the question of how their own (newly reconfirmed) relationship with God can be translated into material evidence, such as photos and souvenirs. In Connie’s case, her new outlook particularly affected her relationship with her sister, who is a former nun. Connie recounts how after she got back she invited her female relatives to lunch to hand out souvenirs and tell them about the trip. [My sister] said, “You’ve changed. I don’t know who you are.” She felt kind of left out and my daughter and my daughter-in-law, they felt kind of left out. They said, “What happened to you?” I tried to explain, but my sister, being a nun for 24 years, thought she knew every little nook and cranny about the religion. . . . When she said, “You’ve changed.” I say, “O.K. so how did I change?” Maybe that’s what they don’t like—that I like it.

Connie’s pilgrimage reordered a previously close relationship; she now claims to have authoritative knowledge stemming from an experience that her sister has not had. It was especially difficult, acknowledges Connie, because her sister’s identity in the family has always rested on being “the religious one.” Two years later, Connie says that she no longer mentions the pilgrimage much, though she believes that its effects are still apparent: her relationship with Jesus is forever changed and continually growing. In some ways, though, transformation is a lonely path. She feels that she lacks conversation partners in her family and at church. “I have come to know Jesus far better than I ever have before but I never have anyone to talk about him to. . . . I can’t talk to anyone at home in my own community.”

“You will never be the same again”: The Role of Transformation “Very dear friends in Christ,” began Father Mike’s first promotional letter, “I am so happy to be able to invite you to join me on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to a place and an experience that will change your life.” Pastor Jim’s material made the same assurance: “It is an experience that will change your life. Every time that you open your Bible for the rest of your life you will have a picture in your mind of the setting because you have seen it with

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expect might happen upon return. Following Turner, most scholars affirm that instead of seeking transformation, contemporary Western pilgrims more vaguely conceive of the experience as making one a “better person.” Other scholars suggest that pilgrimage affirms salvation, reaffirms identity, and results in healing.7 In his formative study of Holy Land pilgrims, Glenn Bowman views it as renewal. Comparing Eastern Orthodox and English Catholic pilgrims, he concludes: Pilgrimage serves as a revitalization of spiritual energies drained by involvement in the labours of the secular world [which] makes Catholic pilgrimage much more individuated than that of the Orthodox; instead of a cosmological celebration of the community of mankind in Christ the Catholics engage . . . in a process of being repossessed by the power that gives meaning to their personal lives and labours.8

Bowman’s description is applicable to American pilgrims—with a few caveats. As discussed earlier, the individuated nature of the experience does not preclude cosmological connections. Nor should “labours of the secular world” be taken to mean that women such as Connie see “worldly” work as secular. Rather, they characterize their work in the world as part of a struggle to live out Christian lives, and they assess the results of their trip based on the patience and diligence with which they commit to these responsibilities anew. Most important, few American pilgrims (and here Connie is an exception) feel that they are drained of spiritual energy before the trip. Although they may be frustrated with aspects of their lives, they describe their faith as peaking: they are closer to Jesus than ever before, which is precisely why they undertake the trip at this moment. An evangelical woman from Chicago explained: “You grow in stages. Things along the way . . . deepen your relationship [with God]. When I felt like I was so close with Jesus that I needed to be with him even more, that was when I went.”9 This response illustrates an important facet of pilgrims’ stories of self: most describe the trip as one step in a lifetime of steady growth with God. Frey notes something analogous in her work on European and American Camino pilgrims: whereas “secular” travelers seeking ill-defined spiritual fulfillment were often frustrated by the lack of transformation following the pilgrimage, believing Catholics viewed the experience

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Land pilgrimage—making Jesus’ earthly life real—and to traveling as an exhilarating adventure (as in “I feel so alive!”). When they return, pilgrims often say that the Bible has gone from “black and white” to “color” or “3-D,” a metaphoric transition between print and the images on a TV or movie screen where the action is so vivid that you feel part of it.16 In practice, making the Bible come “alive” or seeing it “in color” often occurs through meditative visualization. Ella explains this process with reference to the road to Emmaus where, according to the Gospels, Jesus appeared to his disciples after the resurrection. We stopped on the road to Emmaus. There’s an old Crusader church there and there was this road. And you knew it wasn’t the road [in the Gospels] but the road was very old, so again, in my imagination, I could look down that road and see these people kind of walking to this site. . . . I think that’s the difference from being [at historic sites] in Europe because I’m not trying to visualize where I am in Europe. I mean I’m not trying to be a soldier on the Normandy sands. You know that’s what happened but I’m not trying to put myself there. And we learn with the Bible stories that we are really supposed to envision ourselves there now. Like, this is really happening.

When she says “this is really happening,” Ella means that reality in the Holy Land occurs on two levels simultaneously: the historical (the Gospel account of Emmaus) and the contemporary (Jesus is a living presence who guides her actions today). Though prescriptive theology and Bible study materials encourage believers to merge these two realities, it is often difficult for them to feel God’s presence while they read the historical (biblical) text. When Ella returned home she harnessed the visualization experience at Emmaus to enhance her everyday prayer practice. She regularly recalled it while meditating on the appropriate Gospel passage, marrying text and locative experience in order to concretize the fleeting moment of presence she felt on the road.17 Thus, while the Bible is true for pilgrims long before the trip, they hope that going there will make its words fully felt. Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann tracks equivalent techniques, which she calls “inner sense cultivation.” She points out that the deliberate, repeated use of inner visual representation and sensory

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For example, Dave, a member of Derek’s evangelical group, laments his propensity to take the Gospels “at face value.” Although this may seem like a positive trait for a self-described literalist, he sees it as a problem. He illustrates using Matthew 19:24: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” By “face value,” Dave means that he never questioned his assumption that the parable’s meaning lay in hyperbole: a camel is big, a needle is very small. Then his Holy Land guide showed the group a narrow gate in Jerusalem called “eye of the needle.” He suddenly understood that the camel and the needle were never merely metaphors—they were (and are) material things. American pilgrims view such moments as crucial indicators of a trip’s success: each one more fully illuminates the truth of the Bible by harmonizing materiality and metaphor, and by disrupting interpretations that derive from a believer’s own cultural context. For Dave, it is irrelevant whether this new knowledge changes the passage’s fundamental meaning (he believes it does not). Rather, the lesson comes from recognizing his own failure to understand that all passages—even those that seem nonsensical and metaphoric—have meanings that are not evident to him in the United States.21 Some evangelicals, pastors in particular, object to expressions such as “the Bible comes alive” because it implies that the Bible and faith is not enough, that Christians like Dave need the Holy Land in order to fully believe the Gospel promise.22 Few pilgrims express such concerns. If they reject shared metaphors, they do so obliquely. After our return, for instance, Helen described the trip by saying, “I think somehow [the Bible] feels more alive.” But when I asked her to elaborate, she dropped the expression as insufficient to express her personal objectives. “You don’t understand?” she asked me. “It seems more real. It didn’t change a lot of things but it’s more real. Or, it’s more—It’s that after Wally passed away I was just lost and I did something to fill a spot in my life. While I was there it was like Wally was still there with me but I also had something new . . . to look forward to each day.” To her happy surprise, the trip did make a difference. Some former pilgrims (and tour operators and leaders) describe the Holy Land trip as creating a sudden “road to Damascus” change. Most pilgrims, however, conceive of the improvements that result as part of an ongoing process—biblical study for Dave, spiritual renewal for

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for me, OK? I didn’t see it then but when I looked back it was confirmation about what God promised me. I shared it with no one. Just me. [In the photos] you see a light shining on me. A light that none of us saw [at the time], but you see it in the photos. It was confirmation. And when I came out I was so different.

The photographic process, whereby traces of light or tiny details are made visible for the first time, can seem to “both reveal an invisible, dematerialized reality and verify this reality by offering physical evidence.”25 Although Loretta took hundreds of photos, these are the only ones that she printed and looks at regularly, because for her, the light is proof of God’s presence and his concern. He arranged for her to be alone during her baptism, bathed in divine light, so that she would finally get the message: she can extricate herself from those around her and focus on Jesus. She affirms, “I knew that I’d be different after I came home and I am.” Articulating a cherished “wish” before the trip means risking failure. While Loretta was lucky in this regard, Kathy, the Catholic pilgrim described in chapter 4, was less so. She described her motivations for going as linked directly to her belief in miracles and to her role as a caregiver: “My sister’s been very ill for a long time  .  .  . so I decided I’ll go on pilgrimage [to pray] for her. I’ve gone to all the Marian shrines for her, but this is the biggie.” Eight months later, she described the experience very differently, recalling that members of her parish “dragged” her and that her boyfriend, Francis, nagged her until she agreed to go, even though she had originally responded, “No! Just go yourself.” She went, she says, because she felt it would be good for Francis, whose parents had died recently. Still, because of her own chronic health issues, she says, “I thought, this is just going to be a big mistake.” When I asked her about the motivations she had cited in our pre-trip interview, she responded, “Especially at St. Anne’s [in Jerusalem] I prayed that something good would happen for [my sister] but that didn’t. If anything she’s been worse.” H: Did it make you feel disillusioned with the trip? K: Possibly, possibly. Because on all the other [Marian pilgrimages] something small at least has happened for her. And here there was nothing.

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to have a theological (penitential) purpose and cures are not generally expected, as is the case on some Catholic pilgrimages. Yet pain holds derivative value as social glue, creating bonds between strangers, young and old, able and less able. People who have trouble walking are grasped by the elbows, held up, and helped along. There is an ongoing call and response by which more able-bodied members descend stairs first, for example, and then call back instructions for those at the end: Be careful on the third step. It gets narrow. Go slowly. Take your time. Although social psychologists have found no conclusive evidence that gender affects helping behaviors, on the trip these bonds are cultivated primarily between women.26 Not only are female pilgrims quick to help others with physical tasks, but they also exchange small gifts, things that are bought and found. Over the course of Jim’s trip, I accumulated body lotion, a communion cup, a shawl, rocks, and cedar seeds from the Temple Mount. I also helped Dorothy find rocks at the Sea of Galilee, one of which we presented to Helen. She thought of it as a gift from me (she had other stones from Dorothy), and months later when I visited her in North Carolina it was on her front porch carefully lettered with my name and the date I gave it to her. I was particularly important to her, Helen told me, because when she was sick at the end of our trip I found her a wheelchair and helped her around. Her son Sam was less able to cope, perhaps because he was flustered at seeing her so ill. (She was hospitalized for a week after she returned, suffering from exhaustion and diabetic shock.) Although I did not realize it at the time, the role I stepped into is typical; a younger “helper” pilgrim attaches himself or herself to an older person or couple.27 This relationship, though it is not necessarily acknowledged by the group, is often one of the most important aspects of the trip for those involved. In fact, when Sam went on his first pilgrimage without Helen, he formed just such a bond with an older woman. There was this older lady I helped out, across rocks and things and about two weeks after we got back this lady sent me a thank-you card for helping her. I didn’t think about it at the time . . . but after when I got the card I thought, it might not be the exact [same] thing [as Jesus] . . . but that’s what Jesus would’ve wanted us to do, to help someone out. She wasn’t asking for anything and she didn’t want anything but you do it anyway.28

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falutin’”: she speaks “like on TV,” she is clearly better educated and richer, she lacks the easygoing warmth of working-class southerners. Therefore, Dorothy believes, no real bond can be created and the doctor’s offer of help was mere charity with an insinuation that she could not care for herself. In her study of Lourdes, anthropologist Andrea Dahlberg notes that British pilgrims often express dissatisfaction on the way home because they acknowledge the intragroup tensions that have built up.30 This was rarely the case for the pilgrims I studied. While incidents like the one Dorothy describes do happen, the fact that she remembers it years later is rare. Pilgrims almost invariably recall the group as harmonious and often as symbolic of something greater. On Pastor Jim’s trip, for example, Loretta was at the center of a web of group interactions as a diffuser of conflict, a giver of gifts, and a receiver of physical help. Afterward, she compared it to the other major trip she took abroad, a heritage tour to Africa. I tell everybody that I went [to Israel] and met 25 angels. Everybody on that bus! [Begins to cry.] I’ll always remember them even if I don’t see them again. Anywhere I have been with a group of people [like in Africa] there had to be something, something going wrong, somebody don’t like this one or that one. But not on this trip. It was nothing but angels.

In fact, because the New York–based company that organized Jim’s trip had combined smaller groups in order to fill the bus, the dynamic was somewhat strained: some pilgrims thought others were racist, Jim resented the participants who practiced closed communion, the Methodist pastor with us continually reinforced divisions by limiting certain activities to “his” people. In addition, Loretta was not successful after the trip when she tried to contact the group members to whom she felt closest. One, Jonelle, lives only about forty minutes away. I tried [to contact] Jonelle but we corresponded a little bit but you know, I think she’s busy. Genna never e-mailed me back. I sent Helen and Wendy a couple cards. Who else? I’m trying to think. . . . But whether I even see them again they’ve still been a big part of my life, will always be a part of my life. Every single one of them.

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Figure 6.1. Some pilgrims keep souvenirs with the group’s signatures as a tangible reminder of their presence, although they cannot remember (and likely never knew) much about those who signed. In 2009, Jean Damisch, a former pilgrim from Chicago, still had this booklet, a souvenir from her 1966 trip. Courtesy of the Damisch family.

Jordan’s bank, we watched her baptism alone. And like angels’ visits, our time with Loretta relied on its fleetingness. We remain symbolically important precisely because for her we exist only in the Holy Land, unconnected to the everyday responsibilities that she worked hard to leave behind.

“To spur them on in their faith”: Gifting and Displaying Irene, the parish administrator at St. Cecilia’s, organized the church’s 2008 trip and accompanied the group. Afterward, she described the impossibility of keeping her group together as they walked. “At one point Father Brian actually jumped in front of the gift shop and barred the door, saying ‘No! You cannot come in here!’ But no one could stop them from shopping! There was a lot of attempted shopping,”

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with Hebrew writing, Dead Sea mineral creams, olive-wood carvings, and crèches (the scene of Jesus’s birth). When pilgrims purchase “touristy” souvenirs—baseball caps, T-shirts, and the like—they give little thought to their provenance. Religious mementos are a different story. As we have seen, pilgrims are chary of how the commercial and spiritual interact, and this has obvious implications for gift giving in an era when most souvenirs are machine-made commodities. Americans are canny consumers and admit that the “authentic” trinkets from a Holy Land market may come from a Chinese factory. However, they also believe that a commodity can become a religious gift through devotional labor.40 In other words, objects are neither gift nor commodity intrinsically, but they move through phases over the course of their “social lives.”41 One way that pilgrims transform commodities into religious gifts is through the addition of natural objects: pressed leaves or flowers, dirt, water, pebbles, or twigs. These items are metonymic rather than metaphoric—they are actual pieces of place—and as such they do more than evoke memories. They can open a channel for divine presence in the home. For this reason, olive-wood statues are the most popular souvenirs. Pilgrims gravitate toward them because of the olive tree’s biblical symbolism and because they are hand carved from local wood, thus satisfying their desire to bring back pieces of the land itself. Sometimes wood, rocks, or water from the Sea of Galilee constitute the entire gift. Of course, only certain items are seen to possess power, which is derived from sacred context (Jesus was in this water) and cultural construction (belief in the efficacy of holy water).42 While such spiritual channels through objects are more obviously associated with Catholicism, it is actually evangelicals who make use of flora and fauna most. Affixing flowers or leaves to purchased souvenirs is especially important since they cannot imbue these objects with presence through a priest’s blessing.43 Gifts for family are essential, and in this context women also redefine commodities as gifts through a discourse of relationship and sacrifice: an object becomes a religious gift because it is suffused with a grandmother’s love, which is evident in the effort she spent choosing the item and bringing it back.44 These purchases are understood as “pure gifts,” given selflessly without expectation of return; they transform marketdriven consumption into a moral endeavor on behalf of others.45 Such

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to brush her teeth!”), make questionable moral choices (“They’re letting her wear a tank top to school”), or may even actively reject the faith that the pilgrims worked hard to instill. “I just want to be sure I’ll see them all again,” says Helen, “and they’ll be with me and Jesus forever.” Only when irreligious children are unmarried sons in their twenties do mothers evince little concern; he is not yet a father and will hopefully marry a devout girl. In this context, souvenirs such as T-shirts or baseball caps emblazoned with camels or slogans that are clearly “touristy,” not religious, are material metaphors for unconcern. Catholics are more likely than evangelicals to feel responsible for and be anxious about their progeny’s faith. “We should start a St. Monica’s club,” a number of women joked, referring to the seventeen years Augustine’s mother prayed for her wayward son. The religious training of children is of the utmost importance in Catholicism, and mothers take seriously the promise they make at a baby’s baptism to raise him or her in the faith. Their concern in this regard speaks also to the particular history of an American Catholic Church that has grown out of strong ethnic roots.49 Janine, who like many Catholic pilgrims is a second-generation American, prays daily that her adult children will return to the Church. “It really breaks my heart,” she says. “The heritage of persecution and all that my ancestors went through to carry that faith and give it to me . . . the suffering the Irish Catholics endured. This is really a gift and, you know, am I going to be the last one? It’s a really mind-boggling thing.” As a dedicated homemaker, Janine believes that she did her very best to raise her children as cradle Catholics, but she notes that the world is “very different” than when she was raised. Her husband, Frank, floats a possibility: perhaps it is due to feminism “in the radical sense.” But Janine is not convinced. The only thing she knows for sure is that it seems like her family’s faith, and thus its history, may not survive her.50 Janine remains hopeful because her children have yet to settle down.51 Cheryl, on the other hand, is in a predicament that worries Catholic parents most. Her first grandchild has just been born and her son refuses to baptize him. She prays about it daily, but he rebuffs her attempts to broach the subject. She and her husband Bob hope that their pilgrimage and the souvenirs they bring back will inspire their son at some point in the future, perhaps even after they have passed away.52

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Later, Frank discovered that his brother-in-law was physically abusing his nephew, who thought that Frank knew and was a hypocrite for calling himself a Christian while ignoring it. As they recounted the story, Frank and Janine focused not on the abuse but on the accusation of hypocrisy. They worry that if they bring their children religious souvenirs even though they know they do not attend church, they will be accused of being hypocrites, shutting their eyes to their children’s reality. Janine reacts by downplaying the whole process of giving. “I don’t even remember what we brought [back]. Nothing important. Just whatever there was to buy. Which is kind of sad,” she sighed. Janine’s souvenirs are clearly commodities (“Just whatever there was to buy”) rather than items with unique value or divine presence. This is very different from Ella, who described the important place of origin of her gifts (the Sea of Galilee) and the fact that they had been blessed by a priest. However, even pilgrims who believe in the inherent religious value of their gifts often present them as travel souvenirs if they anticipate a negative reaction. They wait for recipients’ response before revealing the object’s “real” worth. In other words, whereas scholars concentrate on how buyers add value to commodities to create gifts, pilgrims exploit the permeability between commodity and gift in order to circumvent and cope with potential rejection.54 In this instance, pilgrims may conceive of religious souvenirs as a reminder of actions that express a relationship with the divine and that could then become a conduit for Jesus’s actual presence. That is, pilgrims hope that when the child sees the souvenir, he or she will reflect upon a chain of associated thoughts: Grandmother went to the Holy Land. Why did she go? Because she loves Jesus. It is a reminder that may then open his or her eyes to the ever-present call of the divine.55 In this sense the Holy Land gift corresponds with cultural theorist Susan Stewart’s description of souvenirs as objects that “surprise and capture a viewer into reverie.”56 Yet whereas for Stewart the souvenir loses all meaning when its purchaser forgets it or dies, pilgrims emphasize that Holy Land gifts express and enable an ongoing relationship, not between tourist and object or even between giver and recipient but between the recipient and God. Giving Holy Land gifts to an irreligious child (or one who could lapse in the future) is thus a faith-filled Trojan horse. Even if the child does not understand the object’s significance,

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with U.S. Christians. It connotes daily prayer, self-sacrifice, and family since it is often used to illustrate the slogan “the family that prays together stays together” and its creation is tied to an apocryphal story that is ubiquitous on Christian e-mail lists and blogs about one brother’s sacrifice for another.59 Along with the hands, Helen added the souvenir olive-wood communion cup from our Garden Tomb service, when she felt Wally’s presence most strongly and told the group about her loss. These souvenirs are the material side of the narrative continuum described above. Just as pilgrims weave the trip into their home life by recollecting and retelling stories, they incorporate its material traces alongside other objects of meaning. The physicality of souvenirs, especially metonymic ones such as those made of olive wood, can evoke particularly polysensual and vivid memories even years after return.60 They are also constitutive of processes that are both personal and social: pilgrims keep aside a few items to provide inspiration during personal prayers, but they arrange the rest in public areas of the home or office where they may lead to conversation.61 The parlor, the mantelpiece, and the family photo album are all particularly important sites for identity creation and reinforcement in AngloAmerican culture, and Helen’s display reflects long-standing ideas about what constitutes respectability: cleanliness, symmetry, family, faith, and femininity.62 While souvenir objects differ depending on denomination— Catholics may purchase a statue of Mary, Protestants a wooden communion cup—the aesthetics of display vary most based on social class. As the images below show, whereas Helen and Dorothy echo Victorian sensibilities (a parlor filled with memory objects evoking family connections and concerns), wealthier pilgrims who live in larger suburban houses, like Joanne and Patty, tend to favor a less cluttered, contemporary look.63 The true significance of the Holy Land object is lost, though, if it is understood only in terms of evoking past memories or constituting identity. As with grandmothers’ gifts, these souvenirs are also religious artefacts, material evidence of intangible relationships that require regular maintenance. Helen believes that both Wally and Jesus are present and that the images and objects in her display bring them into her home: even if she is busy, she is repeatedly reminded of their reality. As she passes by her entryway table, she sometimes pauses for a visit, telling them what she is thinking and listening for their affirmations and help.

Figure 6.2. Helen’s entryway “memory shrine.” Author’s collection.

Figure 6.3. Praying hands and a communion cup in front of the photo of Wally and a grandchild in Helen’s “memory shrine.” Author’s collection. 184

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Figure 6.7. Patty and David, an evangelical couple who live in a spacious house in suburban Vermont, displayed their most significant Holy Land souvenir, an olive-wood carving of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, on the mantel with recent photos of grandchildren and decorative vases. They bought it with this location in mind; the image is a favorite of David’s and a print of Michelangelo’s painting used to hang where the landscape hangs now. Author’s collection.

Derek’s trip, Dale said: “After the second time I saw the pictures, I got really sick of looking at the rocks. It’s like, ‘Where was I?’ And somebody said, you got to do [your photo album] really soon. Well, if you work full time, it’s hard to do it really soon and I was not—I didn’t care to look at them again.”65 Despite some reluctance perhaps, within about six months of return most women have culled their photos and arranged them in an album. As in most amateur snapshot albums, there is a “symbiotic relationship between conventional structure and individual articulation.”66 Pilgrims’ albums follow a remarkably consistent pattern. Photos are sometimes interspersed with postcards, paper souvenirs (tickets, brochures), and maps. Generally the group is absent, while the pilgrim

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emphasizing its spiritual import only with those who they expect will understand. For this reason, pilgrims can feel particularly frustrated if close friends and family persist in seeing the trip as a vacation. In Helen’s case, though her entryway display clearly connects the trip to her faith, her family, and Wally’s death, she feels that those around her continually underestimate (or ignore) its significance. This was made particularly evident to her six months after we returned when her son-in-law, a news photographer, invited her to accompany him to the White House Christmas party. She compares the reaction to the two trips: People actually made more of a big deal about the Christmas party and that bothers me. Because although I went because [he asked me] and I wanted to see the White House decorated for Christmas, true, when I got there I felt so out of place. . . . I was amazed but I didn’t feel comfortable. I could not say I really enjoyed it. But people kept asking [and] I would say, I’ll tell you about the Holy Land how about? Because that was more meaningful to me than any trip to the White House could ever be. But they still say, but what about the White House?

It hurt Helen that those closest to her misunderstood the essential part of self that she was trying to communicate. Unwittingly, though, she may have downplayed the pilgrimage’s significance to others long before the White House Christmas when, worried about “showing off,” she refused her pastor’s requests to describe her experience at church. It is generally older, poorer women like Helen who feel this (not unfounded) concern. A 1972 letter to the editor from a man in Boone, North Carolina—a few hours from Helen’s town—gives a sense of how the people at home can resent returnees: “One pastor I know talked so much of ‘when I was in the Holy Land,’ etc. that his weary congregation in disgust asked him to resign. . . . I fail to see where a six-day trip will make one an authority on the Holy Land or a power in the pulpit.”73 If the authority of a returned pastor is in doubt, then middle-old women are on shaky ground indeed. Connie’s description of her trip at the beginning of this chapter shows how a pilgrim’s sense of spiritual satisfaction can reorder relationships, causing friction and jealousy. Pilgrims can exacerbate these feelings by off-handed comments: “It’s very much an advantage in my religious life” or “I have the inside track now.” One

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veterans.74 Though Holy Land pilgrims say much the same thing—“You can’t understand unless you go”—they use it to mean something rather different. It is a reflection of their assuredness in faith. Thus, even when a pilgrim such as Helen feels frustrated that others miscomprehend, the hurt is passing and not nearly as intense as Frey describes. Indeed, most pilgrims feel that their inability to communicate the trip’s meaning is natural, even powerful. Cindy, a 64-year-old Catholic who went on Father Joe’s Raleigh trip, reflected upon the post-trip dinner that she and her husband Ken had with friends: We couldn’t really relate to our friends how awesome and how overwhelming it was. They tried to listen and we tried to tell them but it’s not possible. . . . But I think [my best friend] saw how hard it is to put it in words and [express] what was the most meaningful thing. I think she was impressed that it was beyond words. That the kind of influence it had is not easy to qualify because it’s such a very personal reaction.

While Cindy began by attempting to explain the trip, many pilgrims dismiss even the possibility of mutual understanding, especially with their adult children. Dennis, a 62-year-old participant on a Moody Bible Institute trip, says: “I tell my kids, you’ve got to find a way to go. But beyond that I wouldn’t think—How would I tell people this was the trip of a lifetime, you know? They need to go to have that experience.” Debra, a Catholic from Ohio, describes how she and the other woman from her parish who went on pilgrimage in 2006 would sometimes share a knowing glance during Mass, triggered by the mention of particular places. “My daughter was sitting next to me and she was like, ‘What is it?’ but I didn’t explain. She’ll just have to go herself, right?” Debra spoke lightly, but it is certainly possible that her daughter felt frustrated or at least left out when she asked for an explanation and was rebuffed.75 Withholding stories of spiritual uplift seems oddly uncharacteristic. Mothers, like Debra, usually seek opportunities to draw their children into their religious orbit, and evangelicals, like Dennis, normally stress the importance of Christian testimony.76 So why refuse to explain what occurred? As Cindy makes clear, a major reason is that the trip is framed as a fundamentally personal experience related to one’s own relationship with Jesus and his Word. For those who are the

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[Jesus] went through. What I cannot understand is why. I know he had to suffer and die because of the Father. He had to go to Calvary. I know. But [the trip] definitely taught me courage and gives me power.” Elise is understandably ambivalent about suffering, Jesus’ and, of course, her own: why does it have to happen? The trip, she feels, allowed her to better feel Jesus’ sacrifice and gave her the strength to endure more because his suffering was so much greater than her own. And while she found it physically taxing, Elise is proud that she made it to almost every site. Back in the United States, she says, “I have good days and bad days when I use a walker. [On the trip] I just kept praying, ‘Please Lord, let me make it!’ I prayed the whole time. It was so hard. . . . Everyone said, ‘Just wait for us here, have a ginger ale and wait.’ But I made every mountain except two. Every one!” The memory of her strength despite her initial misgivings gives her courage as she faces this next seemingly insurmountable struggle. In fact, Elise’s struggle is not really about beating cancer, which her doctors have told her is unlikely, but about confirming Jesus’ presence as she prepares herself for death. This is particularly important for her because she converted from Catholicism twenty years ago and in the process severed her ties with her family. She believes that as Catholics they will not go to heaven, so, unlike most pilgrims, preparing for death does not offer the solace of seeing loved ones again. She envisions heaven as a place filled with strangers. “But no matter who is there to greet me [in Heaven],” she concludes, “I always have that friend, Jesus. The trip made that very clear to me.” Sharon’s feelings are different. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer a month after our trip, she sent word out on the group e-mail list. She was grateful that some people said they would pray for her but was not bothered when most did not respond. She had not expected them to. Nor did she feel that the trip played a significant role in her preparation for death, as it did for Elise. She says that although “it was an added boost to know I got to walk in the places where Jesus walked before all this happened, I would have felt I was right with Jesus regardless. Because that’s just where I am in my life right now. [When I got the diagnosis] I knew Jesus was either going to wait for a little more refining or he’d say, ‘I know you’re tired. Come on home.’ That’s how I felt. Not scared, not panicky.”

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that privilege laypeople’s personal spiritual experience and interpretive authority. Many of the pilgrims (and other Americans who are in the pilgrims’ age group) have benefited from these trends and have grown spiritually as a result. They believe that each individual must develop his or her own relationship with God. Yet Cheryl prays that her son will baptize her grandchild, Loretta watches and worries about the clothes her granddaughter is allowed to wear to school, and Helen is saddened each Sunday when Sam and his family attend the new megachurch in town instead of their rural Baptist church. Despite sometimes feeling hurt and bewildered, however, middle-old grandparents feel that they cannot dictate their family’s religious practice—nor do they want to. Nagging their children or husbands is unproductive, may cause rifts, and seems theologically unsound in how it negates personal agency. These anxieties are lessened when they are channeled into actions such as gift giving and, by extension, the pilgrimage itself. The trip is evidence of a relationship with Jesus and a Christian life well lived, an exciting trip abroad that will be remembered by family and friends for a long time to come. And as long as the memory of one’s trip lives on in the minds of others, it becomes one part of a continual (and delicate) reordering of relationships between women and their husbands, pilgrims and their peers, mothers and their children. These actions, grandparents say, are the legacy they will leave. The hope, as Cheryl puts it above, is that children will grow up and look back and say, “I always saw my mother do this and now I know why.”

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Conclusion

On the first day of Pastor Jim’s trip, the pilgrims emerged bleary-eyed from the Tel Aviv airport, having just arrived on an overnight flight from New York City. But Gilad’s enthusiasm was infectious. He grabbed the microphone as we settled into our seats on the bus. “Israel,” he began, “has something every other country has, yet none has: the Bible. Outside Israel, you have to open a book to read the Bible. In Israel, if you want to read it, you look out a window. You have reached the land of promises.” His greeting was poetic, and although I recognized the sentiment from a late 1970s IMOT ad campaign, I, like the pilgrims, was moved. Sitting behind me, Helen gazed out at the concrete overpasses of Ben Gurion airport and turned to Sam, “Maybe I should stay here for the rest of my life. You’d just have to come back one more time to take me back in a box so I can be [buried] with Wally.” Months later, I sat in Helen’s kitchen and we watched the birds flit over to her feeders. “Do you think you’ll go back to the Holy Land?” I asked. “Oh no,” she said. “I was so sick when we got back. My blood sugar was way out of control.” Well, if you didn’t have diabetes, I reasoned, would you return? “Nah,” she replied. “That was enough. I think about it every day and look at the photos. . . . Anyway, who’d look after Ethan if I went running around?” She stroked her two-year-old grandson’s hair. That day, like most days, he was in her charge. As we talked, he was quietly spilling juice down his front with one hand and rolling a toy car around with the other. Helen jumped up to clean up the mess. If you ask a Christian why she went to the Holy Land, her response will often contain one of two phrases: she wanted to “make the Bible come alive” and to “walk where Jesus walked.” The first answer evokes “aliveness,” the assurance that God is really real. American Holy Land pilgrims are by no means doubters, but like all modern Western >>

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What the preceding chapters have emphasized, however, is that these dualities do not abrogate meaning-making. Put differently, the Holy Land pilgrimage is not religious in spite of its commercial or touristic or global nature. It is powerful precisely because participants engage with defining characteristics of Christian modernity through the juxtaposition of these dualities: the dynamic tension between material evidence and transcendent divinity, the intersection of commoditization and religious authority, the interplay between domestic relationships and global experience. American Christians navigate these categorizations and ways of being every day, of course, but the intentional nature of “walking where Jesus walked” brings them into heightened relief. It is the extra-ordinary nature of this “trip of a lifetime” that makes it such a good experience to think with—for American Christians and for the scholars who study them. These dualities—home/away, transcendent/material, religion/commerce—constitute three broad themes in the preceding chapters, and illuminate two overlapping lines of inquiry: one explores personal experiences, like Helen’s, to which I return below; the second concerns institutional and cultural change. In this context, a few major points stand out. First, pilgrimage is one facet of a larger phenomenon that deserves more scholarly attention: the growth since the 1950s of a multibilliondollar Christian leisure industry. Leisure activities such as trips to the Holy Land are voluntary and are undertaken as a complement to regular church services and activities. As such, they are paradenominational or extradenominational, making them part of what is perhaps the most important trend in modern U.S. Christianity. Parachurch organizations, small prayer and study groups, pilgrimages and tours, retreats and shortterm missions, online chats and TV ministries, to name just a few examples, are central sites of flexible identity production and religious adherence. It is in these contexts that we see contemporary faith in action. Second, the Holy Land is the one place in the world where American Catholics and Protestants regularly encounter each other, and others, at shared worship sites that each group may claim as equally theirs.3 Thus the trip exemplifies (and for pilgrims reinforces) recent trends in ecumenism and pluralism. This is especially evident in how participants define “getting along” in their group and in the ambivalence they may feel toward other Christians at holy sites whose presence reflects and

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to see how the trip impacts pre-existing relationships and how goals are remembered and redefined upon return. Responding to the turn toward transnationalism, scholars in the subfield of American lived religion face an even thornier question: how can we produce careful, phenomenologically minded work about localized faith practices while also developing a more robust theory of global flows? While studies of immigrants and missionaries lend themselves well to such analyses, the particular challenge is how to do so when the people we study do not see themselves as implicated in global processes. The Americans in this book, who are often lower-middle or workingclass women with little travel experience, are a case in point. While there is no “one size fits all” formula, one productive approach that still recognizes the emic perspective is to follow Thomas Tweed and others in conceiving of global connections through the lens of home and “homemaking.”7 For the pilgrims, “home” is a powerful and multivalent concept. They use it to describe how they feel about the Holy Land and as the next step after the material plane when one goes “home to the Lord.” More often, home is the United States: the people they know and the structures they inhabit daily—house, church, town, or suburb. Home is the heart of Christian nurture as most American Christians conceive it and a site of female domestic responsibility. For many pilgrims, their “best self ” is evident in how they nurture their children, their husbands, and their friends in faith. Their experience abroad is contextualized within that central locus. The interplay of home and away—or, put differently, the interplay between the material American home and the imagined Holy Land “home”—is not a dichotomy between two homes, one profane and one sacred. It is a dialectical relationship, where each one relies on the other, offering its own possibilities, rewards, and dangers. The comfort of domestic routine, for example, can lure believers into a spiritual rut or provide insufficient motivation to progress on the metaphoric journey of faith that pilgrims feel they are traveling, especially in middle-old age. Gaining physical distance from this home is essential, symbolically and practically, for pilgrims undergoing life-cycle transitions who hope to jumpstart changes in behavior and outlook. The result, for women especially, is that pilgrimage is a trip abroad undertaken in order to stabilize and preserve the Christian home and their role as ritual experts within it.

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even to a genealogical lineage that they believe extends to Jesus himself. It is this expectation of relationship (real or imagined) that distinguishes contemporary pilgrims from their predecessors, who were content to ignore locals or to photograph them from afar. It reflects major shifts over the last forty years: the development of more ecumenical/pluralistic theologies; “living stones” theology in Catholicism and philosemitism in evangelicalism; and the American quest for “roots” through genealogical research and tourism. More broadly, it speaks to the Christian belief that people can be cosmologically united in a “universal church.” These interconnections are not trivial or less real than socioeconomic and political ones: they are key to how many Americans, especially women, position themselves and act in the world. An unintended effect of scholars’ interest in Christian Zionism has been the almost complete neglect of American Catholic pilgrims, though they account for a significant portion of Israel’s yearly visitors. This lacuna reflects patterns in studies of U.S. religion broadly, which still include Catholics and Protestants too rarely in the same monographs. In service of breaking down these divides, I tackle a major assumption in pilgrimage studies: the place/grace (or material/transcendent) split mapped along Catholic/Protestant lines. In studies of the Holy Land, Catholics are often portrayed as the devotional foil to evangelicals’ biblicism, while Protestants are distinguished by an essentialized aversion to material experience.11 Building on a growing body of work in material culture studies and religion, I have shown that most American evangelicals in fact conceive of “authentic” places in ways that move beyond biblical archeology or even the practice of the panoramic gaze. Authenticity also relies on the sensory experience of being there, feeling “the sand between your toes.” American Catholics further defy scholarly expectations by articulating a growing relationship with Jesus and the Bible. Holy Land pilgrimage is an opportunity for committed lay Catholics to enhance new commitments and practices, such as Bible study, while reaffirming devotional links to earlier generations.12

Commerce, Individualism, and Religious Experience The third broad theme—religion and commerce—cuts to the heart of major debates in the study of modern pilgrimage and tourism.

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love to shop, they don’t like “hard” historical/political facts.17 Female pilgrims bear the stigma of frivolity. This fact and women’s association with the domestic sphere makes particularly problematic a religious experience that requires leaving home and spending money on oneself. This issue is addressed in multiple ways by female pilgrims, evangelicals who are uncertain about the theological justification for pilgrimage, and pilgrims who consider travel an extravagance. They position the trip as a “witness” for others and a compulsion from above marked by divine signs. They draw upon gendered discourses of antimaterialism born of female sacrifice, where the consumption of pilgrimage thus becomes a method of replication and production.18 By purchasing tourism and souvenirs, pilgrims see themselves as doing and giving. Herein lies one of the most persistent tensions for contemporary pilgrims: the struggle between a sense of mutual obligation, including the wish to perpetuate one’s own faith, and a belief in the value of autonomous individuality. This tension, which was evident in the nineteenth century, has intensified in contemporary American Christianity since the 1960s.19 The faith lives of pilgrims have often been enriched by an ethic of personal fulfillment and religious choice (including periods of seeking and denominational switching), by the information they access online and through TV ministries, or by religious “extras” such Bible study groups, retreats, and the pilgrimage itself. However, while pilgrims categorically reject the idea that they can—or should—determine other people’s spiritual trajectories, they also feel called to guide friends and family. They describe a heightened sense of urgency as they grapple with transitions during middle-old age, when most choose to take the trip. Pilgrimage reflects this ambivalence and also mitigates it. Holy Land pilgrims enact spiritual assuredness and experience an intimacy with the divine that may later bolster scripture reading and prayer and bear them up during moments of pain or doubt. Pilgrims hope that this signal undertaking will also be a witness to others as they embody their devotion to God through actions rather than words, the most sincere of which can be construed as intrusive or demanding. In this sense, the pilgrimage is always for self and for others. It creates a ripple effect, cascading down to husbands, friends, and children in ways that the pilgrim cannot predict and may never even know.

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finding steady employment. She is trying to view it as an opportunity to discern the Lord’s will. Perhaps, she laughs but she means what she says, perhaps it is God’s way of nudging her to take another Holy Land trip instead. “Nothing’s over,” Dorothy reminds me, “until you’re dead.” She pauses, “Even then it’s not over but your troubles are over. Because then you’re home with Jesus.”

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Notes Notes to the Acknowledgments and Methodology 1. Orsi, “Everyday Miracles,” 10–11; Stout and Hart, New Directions in Religious

History, 5–6.

Notes to the Introduction 1. “Evangelical” is admittedly imprecise; I use it to signal Christians who adhere

2.

3. 4. 5.

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to four core tenets outlined by historian David Bebbington and affirmed by the National Association of Evangelicals: conversionism (being “born again”), biblicism, missionary and reformist activism, and crucicentrism. I exclude Pentecostals but include members of historic denominations, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, if they are on evangelical trips. If pilgrims have denominational affiliations (normally Methodist or Baptist), I note them. National Association of Evangelicals, “What Is an Evangelical,” www.nae.net/ church-and-faith-partners/what-is-an-evangelical, accessed May 14, 2012. Israeli Ministry of Tourism (IMOT) surveys in 2010–11 showed ~360,000 U.S. Christians visitors, of whom 186,000 self-identified as pilgrims. In 2011–12, IMOT tweaked the questions, and the unpublished IMOT estimate for that year classes an additional 33,000 U.S. evangelicals as “pilgrims,” bringing the total to ~219,000. Since I define pilgrim expansively, I estimate a bit higher to 250,000. See IMOT, “Inbound Tourism Survey, 2009-2010”; Central Bureau of Statistics, “Visitor Arrivals by Country of Citizenship,” 2011; Israel Ministry of Tourism, North America, “Christian Protestant RFP 1/2012, Questions and Answers,” June 26, 2012, document in author’s possession; Ernst & Young LLP, Tourism Market Study Summary Report, November 2006, unpublished report for Israel’s Ministry of Tourism, 146–48, 157–60; Ester Sultan, IMOT Director of Research & Statistics, e-mail message to author, September 13, 2012; Yaniv Belhassen, e-mail message to author, September 9, 2009. Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture, 246. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, chapters 2–4. Anthropologists Nancy Frey and Anna Fedele e-mailed follow-up questions in their studies of, respectively, the Camino de Santiago and alternative Catholic pilgrimage in France. Anthropologist Catrien Notermans also recently did preand post-trip interviews in a study of Lourdes. See Notermans, “The Power of the Less Powerful.” Cultural historians have produced significant work on the Holy Land but end their discussions before the founding of Israel, after which tourism often seems too “political”; see Vogel, To See a Promised Land, xiv, 4. On Christian Zionism, the best scholarly sources include Merkley, Christian Attitudes; Spector,

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8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

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16. Klatzker, “American Christian Travelers to the Holy Land,” 15, 225; Pfeiffer, First

American Catholic Pilgrimage to Palestine, 1889, trip lists. 17. Based on interviews with tour professionals and IMOT data, I estimate that

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

about 10 percent of the remaining 40 percent of U.S. Christian visitors are Latter-day Saints, Orthodox, and others. Thirty percent are mainline Protestant, members of Black historic churches, and Pentecostal (some of whom might also fall under “evangelical”). Classifications can be difficult based on IMOT data. In 2009, for example, IMOT surveys of U.S. pilgrims showed 37.4 percent Catholic and 3.8 percent evangelical; the following year, they recorded 14 percent Catholic and 30.7 percent evangelical. According to Ester Sultan, director of research and statistics at IMOT, the total number of Catholics remained consistent, but the way questions are worded and the way Israelis class evangelicals (as “pilgrims” or “tourists”) are in flux. In 2011, IMOT’s breakdown for all Christian visitors globally was 54 percent Catholic, 15 percent evangelical, 7 percent mainline, 10 percent Orthodox, and 14 percent other. IMOT, “Inbound Tourism Survey, 2009-2010,” Jerusalem, 2011, document in author’s possession; State of Israel, Central Bureau of Statistics, “Visitor Arrivals by Country of Citizenship,” 2011, document in author’s possession2011; Ester Sultan, e-mail message to author, December 5–6, 2012. There are two chapters in Lederhendler and Sarna, America and Zion; several chapters in Greenberg, Holy Land in American Religious Thought; and one chapter in Merkley, Christian Attitudes. McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 28, 61–62. Zelizer, “The Social Meaning of Money,” 355–56; Sered, Women as Ritual Experts, 132–34; Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart, 296n1. Zelizer, “The Social meaning of Money,” 369. Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs, x, 39; “See the Holy Land,” Moody Monthly, May 1955, 70. Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion, 93–131. As there is no agreement about what to call this life stage, I took creative license. Though sociologists generally use “middle-old” to refer to people aged 75–85, I liked how it evokes pilgrims’ interstitial status in their families and communities. Mandatory retirement has been repealed, but the age of sixty-five still often signifies a transition and loss of status. Achenbaum, Old Age in the New Land, 39–106. Dillon and Wink, In the Course of a Lifetime, 81–83. Wuthnow, God and Mammon in America, 125–33. On Christian leisure travel in this age group, see Ketchell, Holy Hills. This pattern is consistent in other developed countries for similar reasons; see Hermkens, Jansen, and Notermans, “Introduction: The Power of Marian Pilgrimage,” 5; and Reader, “Pilgrimage Growth in the Modern World,” 216–17.

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home places, generally because studies began as village ethnographies. Gold, Fruitful Journeys; and Sallnow, Pilgrims of the Andes are the best known. For example, Wuthnow’s Boundless Faith. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling, 59. This term is from Sered, Women as Ritual Experts. She uses it to denote the extraliturgical (and underrecognized) religious expertise of Orthodox Jewish women, who maintain household rituals and pray for kin. Though Sered’s interlocutors differ from mine, there is a clear analogy: most pilgrims, especially women, fulfill a comparable role in their families and communities. Dahlberg, “The Body as a Principle of Holism,” 30–50; Gemzoe, “The Feminization of Healing in Pilgrimage to Fatima,” 24–48; Pena, Performing Piety, 78. Engelke, A Problem of Presence. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 369. In pilgrimage studies, Eade and Sallnow’s Contesting the Sacred, is often (and somewhat unfairly) held up as emblematic of the semiotic approach. Coleman, “Bringing ‘Structure’ Back In,” 23–24; Morgan, “Materiality, Social Analysis, and the Study of Religions,” 62. Religionist Jonathan Z. Smith’s To Take Place (1987) was a catalyst for these conversations. Butler, “Historiographical Heresy,” 286–309. Jonathan Z. Smith and anthropologist Talal Asad have also noted this. Bowman, “Christian Ideology and the Image of a Holy Land.” He describes Orthodox pilgrims as the most material in their religious practice. Other relevant literature is cited in the notes 5, 6, and 7 in chapter 3. Purchas His Pilgrimage (London, 1613), quoted in Obenzinger, American Palestine, 20. Formative scholars of Protestant material culture include David Morgan and Colleen McDannell. Apart from the Holy Land (and civil religious sites), work on U.S. Protestant pilgrimage is limited to Tweed, “John Wesley Slept Here”; and Neville, Kinship and Pilgrimage. Intriguingly, an essay in a recent classroom text on American religion includes Pentecostals as pilgrims. Though they are portrayed as drawn to healers rather than to places, as their Muslim and Catholic counterparts are, it speaks to how the field is expanding. Brown, “Practice.” For example, Thomas Csordas and Susan Harding in the late 1980s and Peter Stromberg in the early 1990s. Halbwachs, The Legendary Topography of the Gospels in the Holy Land, 193–237. Quote from Stromberg, Language and Self-Transformation, 3; Riessman, Narrative Methods, 14–15. Riessman, Narrative Methods, 1–5. Swatos and Tomasi, From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism, 3; Raj and Morpeth, Religious Tourism, 11.

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8. Thomson, The Land and the Book, 1. This is the most popular book of the genre

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

and it appeared in over thirty editions. See also Davis, The Landscape of Belief, 34–36, 45–47. John Heyl Vincent developed Palestine Park after his pilgrimage to the Holy Land; Messenger, Holy Leisure, 112–25. Henry Ward Beecher’s The Life of Jesus, the Christ (1871) was a popular “life of Christ” book; Prothero, American Jesus, 69. Rogers offers a succinct overview of this media in Inventing the Holy Land, 24–32. Vincent, “Introduction”; Ben-Arieh, “Perceptions and Images of the Holy Land,” 37–53; Davis, The Landscape of Belief, 73–100. Gutjahr, An American Bible, 147. Charles Dudley Warner quoted in Walker, Irreverent Pilgrims, 29; Davis, “Catholic Envy,” 36. Edward Robinson’s best-selling Biblical Researches (1841) first popularized biblical archaeology. It was so glaringly anti-Catholic that some reviewers actually complained. William W. Orr, “At the Garden Tomb,” Moody Monthly, April 1960, 13–14; Paul Radar, “At the Open Tomb,” World-Wide Christian Courier, February 1930, 3, 14. Marston was an amateur archeologist and businessman in the 1930s. Schilling, “Life at the Holy Sepulchre,” The North American Review, July 1894, 77–87. Franciscans participated in digs too but believed that archeology would complement tradition. Commissariat of the Holy Land, Guide to the Franciscan Monastery, 76; Klaztker, “The Franciscan Monastery of Washington DC,” 246–47. Commissariat of the Holy Land, Guide to the Franciscan Monastery,16–18, 147–49; Franciscan Monastery Memorial Church of the Holy Land, A Visit to the Franciscan Monastery Memorial Church of the Holy Land, 3; Klatzker, “American Christian Travelers to the Holy Land,” 248. Fifth American Catholic Pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Rome, 17; Hoade, Guide to the Holy Land, 111, 128; Power, “The Rights of the Catholic Church in the Holy Land.” A. G. Cicognani, memorandum, November 3, 1949, Box 44, Folder 18, Records of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, ACUA; “Catholics Ask UN for Palestine Study,” NYT, August 21, 1948, 5; “Catholics Press Jerusalem Claim,” NYT, April 27, 1949, 20; “An Appeal for Christian Unity,” America, May 20, 1959; “The Pope and Palestine,” Commonweal, November 5, 1948, 85. This 1948 article still rings with crusade language: “It was to obtain access to the Holy Sepulchre that the Crusades were fought and, since they were won, Jerusalem has been the heart-city of all mankind.” See also Lux, The Jewish People, the Holy Land, and the State of Israel. “Going to Jerusalem, Review of Friar Felix at Large,” Time Magazine, April 10, 1950, 98. Filas, The Family for Families, preface, 20–22, 42. The popularization of Holy Land re-creations (including the Stations of the Cross) dates to Counter-Reformation models of piety; Morris, The Sepulchre of Christ, 371–74.

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33. Weber, On the Road to Armageddon, 95; Ariel, Evangelizing the Chosen People.

On British antecedents, see Lewis, The Origins of Christian Zionism. 34. “Christian Witness in Israel,” Christianity Today, July 31, 1961, 22; “Jewish Mobs

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

Stone New Church in Jerusalem,” Christianity Today, July 31, 1961, 25; “Zealots in the Holy Land,” Christianity Today, October 11, 1963, 33. Major media flareups occurred in the early 1960s and the early and late 1970s. Carl F. H. Henry, Kenneth L. Wilson, and Sherwood E. Wirt, “On ChristianJewish Understanding,” Christianity Today, November 10, 1961, 34. The authors were editors in chief of major evangelical magazines: Christianity Today (Henry), The Christian Herald (Wilson), and Decision (Wirt). For example, Taslitt, Faith Walks the Land. The editors even enlisted Dwight Baker (correspondent for Christianity Today) and Herbert Minard (secretary of the Jerusalem YMCA) as consultants. The 1950 Law of Return (with the 1970 amendment) is available at Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Law of Return 5710-1950,” http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/ mfa-archive/1950-1959/pages/law%20of%20return%205710-1950.aspx, accessed August 2, 2013. “The Loss of Identity: Who Is a Jew?” Christianity Today, March 15, 1963, 25. Catholics were much less critical. The Jesuit editors of America shrugged it off as “odd.” See “The Monk’s Case,” America, December 22–29, 1962, 1267. Harold O. J. Brown, “Christians and Jews—Bound Together,” Christianity Today, August 18, 1978, 16–20. On anti-missionary laws, see Jakob Jocz, “A Test of Tolerance,” Christianity Today, March 29, 1963, 6–8; Carl F. H. Henry, “Religious Pressure in Israel,” Christianity Today, May 11, 1973, 32–33; “Israeli Law: Toward Convert Control,” Christianity Today, February 10, 1978, 54–55; and “News: Baptist Leader Discusses Israel Law with Begin,” Moody Monthly, March 1979, 21. John Green and Anna Greenberg, “A Look at Religious Voters in the 2008 Election,” http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1112/religion-vote-2008-election, accessed December 4, 2012; Kosmin, “How Wide Is the Social Distance?” 46–47. Anonymous interviewee, interview with the author, May 21, 2012. This ambivalence is illustrated in Ariel, Philosemites or Anti-Semites? Rothenberg, Presenting America’s World, 165; Mart, Eye on Israel, 85–108. McGill, Israel Revisited, 28–29, 58–59; John Cogley, “The Homeless and the Housed” Commonweal, January 15, 1953, 377–78. McGill, Israel Revisited, 58–59. Lieven, America Right or Wrong, 179–80. This association with Amerindians is long-standing; one example is Melville’s epic 1876 poem Clarel. Steve Wall, “Palestinian Refugee,” 1971, 9–10, article manuscript, Box 41, Folder 14, William Clemont Fields Papers, AR627 (hereafter Fields Papers), Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives (hereafter SBHLA), First Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia. McAlister, Epic Encounters, 68. This quote refers to spirituals but also pertains to McAlister’s argument regarding epics (see 160–63).

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62. Jordan had 616,000 Christian pilgrims, compared to Israel’s 320,000, and made

63.

64.

65.

66. 67.

68.

69.

$33.6 million, compared to Israel’s $64 million. James Feron, “Israel Opens Holy Sites in Jordan to Tourists,” NYT, June 24, 1967, 3. For more on these markets, see Kaell, “Pilgrimage in the Jet Age,” 32–33. IMOT, Annual Report: The Activities of the Ministry of Tourism (1964), 16, 30, 33; IMOT, Annual Report: The Activities of the Ministry of Tourism (1967), 24, 29. IMOT advertised in the first issue of Christianity Today in 1956 and then largely ignored the evangelical market until the 1970s. Spector, Evangelicals and Israel, 144–47; Kaell “Pilgrimage in the Jet Age,” 24, 32–33. On awards, see “News from Israel,” Moody Monthly, June 1963, 7; “[Roy Gustafson] Biography,” Papers of Roy Gustafson, Collection 649, Billy Graham Center Archives, http://www2.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/GUIDES/659.htm, accessed May 12, 2011. State of Israel, Ministry of Tourism, Request for Proposal for a Strategic Program for Increasing the Scope of Christian-Protestant Tourism, Public Tender Number 1/2012, June 26, 2012, in author’s possession. Bowman, “The Politics of Tour Guiding,” 121–34; Cohen-Hattab, “Zionism, Tourism, and the Battle for Palestine,” 61–85. Hani Abu Dayyeh, interview with the author, May 29, 2009. Abu-Dayyeh’s company dates from the early 1950s. It was preceded by companies like Oweida Brothers, which were founded during the Mandate period by former Thomas Cook porters. Bowman’s tally of IMOT guide licenses in the 1970s–1980s fleshes out Abu-Dayyeh’s claim; Bowman, “The Politics of Tour Guiding,” 139. See also Khano, Sayre, and Al-Filastini, The Palestinian Tourism Sector: Present State and Future Prospects, 1–4. Wathen, interview with the author, January 23, 2009; Pietro Felet (secretary general, Assembly of the Catholic Ordinaries), e-mail message to author, August 20, 2013. The spiritual leader credential is not, strictly speaking, a license. Notably, it is restricted to guiding at religious sites. This system was negotiated in the early 1980s between the Latin Patriarchate, the Custody of the Holy Land (Franciscans) and the Israeli government. The Catholic representatives felt that Jewish tour guides were unqualified to offer Christian explanations (and even told “tasteless jokes [that] offend the sensitivities” of pilgrims, according to Father Felet). The tour guide union feared increased competition. The system was formalized in a series of High Court cases in the 1980s. The Episcopal Commission (under the authority of the Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries) licenses pastors or priests from any of the thirteen churches recognized by Israel. Walter McCord, interview with the author, November 10, 2008; Aryah Harel, “Guiding Tourists across Sacred Ground,” Messianic Times, July–August 2010, 1, 13; Hani Abu Dayyeh, interview with the author, May 29, 2009. American evangelicals do not technically qualify for the “green card” since they do not belong to a church that is officially recognized by Israel (unless they are Lutherans or Anglicans). Walter McCord, for example, a professor at Moody who received

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71.

72. 73.

74.

75. 76.

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15, Fields Papers. Tapp’s letter was a response to “So You’d Like to Travel!” Moody Monthly, May 1967, 28–29. Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart, 88. Kelly Cocanougher, “Sin and Shame, Pastor Says of Tour Recruiting by Colleagues,” The Louisville Times, January 4, 1973. Gardner, “Technological Changes and Monetary Advantages,” 303–5. The Christian Service Brigade created and sold client lists in the mid-1960s. It is very possible that it has tour companies as clients, since three of the biggest (the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Wheaton Travel, and Gotaas) were based close by. Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion, 93–131; Dillon and Wink, In the Course of a Lifetime, 63. Kaell, “Pilgrimage in the Jet Age,” 25–27. I draw this language from the Catechism of the Catholic Church that was promulgated in 1992. Bob Faucett, interviews with the author, February 28, 2008, and March 4, 2008. Reader, “Introduction,” 13–15; Aziz, “Dimensions of the Sacred Journey,” 247–61. Dahlberg “The Body as a Principle of Holism,” 39. Wuthnow, God and Mammon in America, 4–7, 19, 21. On conflict avoidance in evangelicalism, see Smith, Christian America? 42–45. Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion, 93–131; Ammerman, “Golden Rule Christianity,” 196–216; Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, and Swidler, Habits of the Heart, 221. Though Ammerman describes “mainline” Protestants, “Golden Rule” as I use it here applies also to Catholics and evangelicals. On individualism among Catholics, see Baggett, Sense of the Faithful, 75–76, 195–200; on evangelicals, see Bielo, Words upon the Word, 86. Griffith, God’s Daughters, 15. Coleman, “Mary on the Margins,” 28. Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 13. Collins-Kreiner, Kliot, Mansfield, and Sagi, Christian Tourism to the Holy Land, 54. Compare Basu, Highland Homecomings, 104. Heritage tourists do more preparation, since they regard their trips as reclamations of history/knowledge rather than an extension of a personal relationship with Jesus. Frey, Pilgrim Stories, 71–86; Lee and Ingold, “Fieldwork on Foot,” 68–71. Collins-Kreiner, Kliot, Mansfield, and Sagi, Christian Tourism to the Holy Land, 54–60. Herschel H. Hobbs to Tommy Watson, June 24, 1969, Box 67, Folder 8, Herschel Harold Hobbs Papers, AR332, SBHLA; William Wayne Dehoney to Dennis Kern, September 23, 1987, Box 18A, Folder 3, William Wayne Dehoney Collection, AR880, SBHLA; Richard Damisch, interview with the author, November 7, 2008. Zelizer, “The Social Meaning of Money,” 369.

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48. On respite, see Radway, Reading the Romance, 4, 14, 113. On solutions, see Win-

kelman and Dubisch, “The Anthropology of Pilgrimage,” xxiii; Pena, Performing Piety, 76–78; and Basu, Highland Homecomings, 183–84. 49. Miyazaki, “Faith and Its Fulfillment,” 32, 44. More work is needed in order to properly compare Catholics and evangelicals on this score, but the way that evangelicals describe the limits placed on human agency also reflects theologies of submission as discussed in Griffith, God’s Daughters; and Luhrmann, When God Talks Back. 50. Stromberg, Language and Self-Transformation, 111; Kayla, pre-trip interview with the author, February 11, 2012; Dale, pre-trip interview with the author, February, 16, 2012.

Notes to Chapter 3 1. Ellis, Bible Lands To-day, 194. 2. Butler, “Historiographical Heresy,” 296. On the Catholic side, Father Andrew

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

Greeley argues that fundamental differences persist. See Greeley, The Catholic Imagination. Regarding how U.S. Protestants define themselves against a Catholic “Other,” see Franchot, Roads to Rome, 183–85. Tweed, “John Wesley Slept Here,” 42; Timothy and Olsen, Tourism Religion and Spiritual Journeys, 275. Engelke, A Problem of Presence, 14. This discussion has antecedents in pilgrimage literature, notably Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 205. Quote in Belhassen, Caton, and Stewart, “The Search for Authenticity,” 682. This larger trend is evident in Chidester and Linenthal, American Sacred Space. This paradigm dates from 1991; see Bowman, “Christian Ideology and the Image of a Holy Land,” 98–121. More recent examples include Fleischer, “The Tourist behind the Pilgrim,” 315–16; Bajc, “Creating Ritual through Narrative,” 395–412; and Rogers, Inventing the Holy Land, 117–42. Belhassen, Caton, and Stewart, “The Search for Authenticity,” 673–74; Bowman “Christian Ideology and the Image of a Holy Land,” 116; Bajc, “Creating Ritual through Narrative.” Historians of the nineteenth century also connect this preference to Americans’ idealization of their relationship to nature. See Davis, The Landscape of Belief, 47. Note that this use of “open” in Holy Land studies differs from it use in wider scholarship; compare Tuan, Space and Place, 54, 71. Morgan, Protestants and Pictures, 275. On the definition of presence, see Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 2, 49–51; Hermkens, Jansen, and Notermans, “Introduction,” 8–9. The concept of relationship with the deceased has obvious antecedents in Catholicism (e.g., Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory), but it exists also in Protestantism, as shown in Neville, Kinship and Pilgrimage, 127–28. Feld and Basso, “Introduction.” Construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre began during Constantine’s reign in the fourth century. Records of the first pilgrims date to shortly after

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

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25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

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34. Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 153. I base “mobilized gaze” on Schivelbusch’s “mobility

of vision”; see Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 52–70. 35. For example, see the script of the World Wide Pictures film His Land, 1969, Box

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

4, Folder 19, Collection 214, BGCA; Robert R. Yandle, “Why Go to the Holy Land?” Church Administration, January 1999, 36–38. Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted in Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 52, 61. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 112. Coleman, “From the Sublime to the Meticulous,” 282–84. IMOT, Annual Report: The Activities of the Ministry of Tourism (1970), 5; Bajc, “Christian Pilgrimage Groups in Jerusalem,” 123. See also Howard F. Vos, “The Year in Biblical Archeology,” Moody Monthly, January 1957, 17; Oswald T. Allis, “Israel and the Canaanites,” Christianity Today, February 1, 1960, 14–16, 24; Gordon Govier, “New Evidences for Israeli Exodus,” Christianity Today, April 3, 1995, 39, 87. Bielo, Words upon the Words, 83. Evangelicals actually focus on a number of popular passages. For the concept of open space, refer to note 7 of this chapter. Morgan, “Introduction: The Matter of Belief,” 1, 9. Tuan, Space and Place, 183–84; Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 108. On prayer, see Ostrander, “The Practice of Prayer in a Modern Age,” 77–95. Morgan, “Preface,” xiii. Bowman, “Christian Ideology and the Image of a Holy Land,” 116. Peale, Adventures in the Holy Land, 117–18; Rianna, interview with the author, November 26, 2008. Tammy, letter to the author, January 9, 2008. I use “sublime” in the Kantian sense. From the Bible for Revival, music CD, compiled and produced by Dov Zeira and Eitan Rechtman, Hataklit, 2010. According to my tally, the origin of songs is 32 percent Protestant, 26 percent Israeli (including Hatikvah), 26 percent Ashkenazi or liturgical, 10 percent Broadway, and 5 percent unidentified. Gordon, “The Souvenir,” 139. Dehoney, An Evangelical’s Guide to the Holy Land, 5, Dehoney’s italics. Moore, “Baptist View: Christ’s Presence as Memorial.” Transubstantiation is the belief that the bread and wine become Christ’s body and blood during the celebration of Eucharist. “Memorial meal” and “sign” are theologians’ terms; laypeople often use “symbolic.” Elisha, Moral Ambition, 19–21. Ray, pre-trip interview with the author, January 25, 2012. Dehoney, An Evangelical’s Guide to the Holy Land, 72. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 273. Weeping has been an accepted expression for Protestant pilgrims since the nineteenth century (Greenberg, Holy Land in American Religious Thought, 88, 101), though it left men open to criticism (Obenzinger, American Palestine, 52).

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unpublished Confraternity of Christian Doctrine study from 2002. The findings of the study match qualitative assessments by Bible study experts. For example, Daniel Harrington, interview with the author, September 21, 2009; and Paglia, Thirsting for the Word, 122–23. The Raleigh study is Born, “Post-Retirement Religiosity among Migrating Northern Catholic Baby Boomers,” 280. Bielo, Words upon the Word; Wuthnow, Sharing the Journey, 68–70, 310–11. There is no major study of Catholic Bible study groups. There is some data on Catholic small groups, 78 percent of which discuss scripture. See Lee, The Catholic Experience of Small Christian Communities 84, 89–93. There is significant work on the Catholic Bible Association, which was made up of clergy who were bible scholars. Fogarty, American Catholic Biblical Scholarship. “Little Rock Scripture Study ‘Great Expectations’ Realized,” Little Rock Scripture Study Web site, www.littlerockscripture.org/en/about_history.html, accessed February 9, 2010. Baggett, Sense of the Faithful, 70, 128, 209; Wuthnow, Sharing the Journey, 242–51, 292–93. Chinnici, “The Catholic Community at Prayer,” 85. Some scholars still see Vatican II as the catalyst for entirely new changes (e.g., Laffey, “Scripture After Vatican II,” 100–11), but most concur with Chinnici. See for example, Kelly, The Transformation of American Catholicism; and McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful, 101. Chinnici, Habits of Devotion, 30–39; Barnabas Mary Ahern, “Gathering the Fragments: Bible Study in the U.S.,” Worship 36, no. 2 (1962): 100–6; “The Catholic Family Bible,” Columbia, January 1955, 1; Lynch, Selling Catholicism, 96. From 1964 vigil instructions in a Pennsylvania parish quoted in Chinnici, Habits of Devotion, 24. Kilian McDonnell, “Organizing a Bible Vigil,” Worship 34, no. 3 (February 1960): 144–48. Vigils had lost popularity by about 1968. Dillon, Catholic Identity, 35. Eugene E. Ryan, “Is the Catholic Church Going Protestant?” Christianity Today, March 18, 1966, 5; Walter M. Abbott, “Bishops and the Common Bible,” America, December 8, 1962, 12–14. E. La Verdiere, “There’s No Such Thing as a Catholic Fundamentalist,” U.S. Catholic, September 1989, 36–39; Megan Sweas, “Are You Well Versed in the Bible?” U.S. Catholic, September 2007, 18–20. Varacalli, The Catholic Experience in America, 87; William McCready and Andrew Greeley, “The End of American Catholicism?” America, October 28, 1972, 334–38. Father Andrew Greeley, Richard Schoenherr, and Dean Hoge are best known for popularizing the term. A major exception is the work on charismatic Catholics. On politics and ecumenism, see Shea, The Lion and the Lamb. J. L. Lynch, “Franciscan Missions in the Moslem Empire,” Franciscan Tertiary, August 1892, 124; Hoade, Guide to the Holy Land, 111, 128.

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43. Ashley, “The Stations of the Cross,” 352; Fox, “Renewing Rituals,” 221–26; Albert

44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

Judy, “Stations of the Cross: A Scriptural Version,” http://www.laydominicans. com/Live/stations.htm, accessed July 5, 2013. Barthes, The Eiffel Tower, 9; Bowman, “Christian Ideology and the Image of a Holy Land,” 115–16. Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of Power, 162–90; Castelli, “Persecution Complexes,” 152–80; Ken, pre-trip interview with the author, January 22, 2012. Lindsay refers to evangelicals, but his conclusions in this context also apply to Catholics. This speaks to a long-standing sociological conversation that is epitomized in well-known work by Herberg in the 1950s and Bellah in the 1960s. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 98–99. However, Certeau’s characterization of walking as a “tricky and stubborn” practice that eludes discipline is less relevant to mass market pilgrimage. See also Lee and Ingold, “Fieldwork on Foot,” 67–86. Edensor, “Walking in Rhythms,” 69–79. The Stations of the Cross, pamphlet (Nebraska: Creighton University, ca. 2009). Matthew 13:52; Piero Marini, “Returning to the Sources: A Service to the Liturgy,” Office of Papal Liturgical Celebrations Web site, www.vatican.va/news_ services/liturgy/2006/documents/ns_lit_doc_20060323_ritorno-fonti_en.html, accessed May 2, 2012.

Notes to Chapter 5 1. Catholics believe that Mary has no burial site because she was assumed bodily

into heaven. 2. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). Relevant

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

discussions include Campbell, The Romantic Ethic; Moore, Selling God; and, on pilgrimages, Kaufman, Consuming Visions. Kaufman, Consuming Visions, 14; Dee Dyas, “Pilgrims and Pilgrimage,” www. york.ac.uk/projects/pilgrimage/content/reform.html, accessed December 1, 2012. Fleischer, “The Tourist behind the Pilgrim,” 323. This is true of U.S. tourists in general; see MacCannell, The Tourist, 157. MacCannell (ibid, 91-107) applies Erving Goffman’s societal “backstage” to tourism, arguing that most visitors seek to explore the (staged) “everyday.” In the context of ritual, pilgrims do not. Pilgrims often fear Arab men and are counseled to avoid crowds in order to “minimize” the chance of a “terrorist incident,” as expressed in Dyer and Hatteberg, The New Christian Traveler’s Guide to the Holy Land, 16–17. Mary Hornaday, “Christmas in Bethlehem,” Presbyterian Life, December 1, 1966, 11; Wesley G. Pippert, “At Home in the Holy Land,” Moody Monthly, October 1985, 34–37. Feldman, “As It Is Written,” 6–8.

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28. Schloeder, Architecture in Communion, 16, 23. 29. McDannell, Spirit of Vatican II, 211 30. McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful, 174–75; Schloeder, Architecture in Commu-

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

nion, 20, 40–41. The Franciscans had long characterized their Holy Land architecture as “simplicity” compared to Greek structures, but it was still cluttered by today’s standards. See, for example, Commissariat of the Holy Land, A Visit to the Franciscan Monastery Memorial Church of the Holy Land, 3. Buggeln, “Form, Function and Failure,” 197, 210; Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs, 39. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 89. Esther, post-trip interview with author, January 22, 2009. Vanlaningham, interview with the author, November 10, 2008. Some Catholics also cope by frequenting more aesthetically pleasing sites. According to Greg Wolfe, director of the “Protestant” Garden Tomb, the proportion of American Catholic visitors has risen since the 1990s from negligible to about 5 percent of the total. Wolfe, interview with the author, June 15, 2009. Esther, post-trip interview with author, January 22, 2009; Schloeder, Architecture in Communion, 29–30. The Ugly American, a 1958 political novel that was made into a film in 1963, depicted Americans abroad as loud and boorish. Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 96; Chidester and Linenthal, “Introduction,” 13–14. Coleman, “Mary on the Margins?” 28. In 1882, 1921, and 1924, the U.S. government set quotas to curtail the overseas immigration of groups that were not from western Europe. The quotas were revoked in 1965, leading to unprecedented growth in religious pluralism. Griffith, God’s Daughters, 85. Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 129. Gould, A Modern Pilgrimage, 60; Fox, An Observer in Palestine, 27; Vogel, To See a Promised Land, 69–79; Shepherd, The Zealous Intruders, 101, 105; Rogers, Inventing the Holy Land, 81–82. Itai Lavee, interview with the author, May 28, 2009. Cohen, “Introduction: Locating Filth,” vii–ix, xviii–xxiii. On Western pilgrims in general, see Collins-Kreiner, Kliot, Mansfield, and Sagi, Christian Tourism to the Holy Land, 110. Guides also juxtapose (Israeli) agriculture with the (Arab) desert to illustrate God’s enduring promise to the Jewish people and the technological ingenuity of Israelis. Ella, post-trip interview with the author, January 24, 2009. Dave, post-trip interview with the author, May 13, 2012. See, for example, the work of religion scholars Kerry Mitchell and Bron Taylor on national parks. Mark 12:17; Noll, One Nation under God? 160–66.

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63. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers; Fass, “Childhood and Youth as an

64.

65.

66.

67.

68. 69.

70.

71.

72. 73.

74. 75.

American/Global Experience in the Context of the Past,” 37; Kaell, “Age of Innocence.” This attitude also depends on class, geographic region, and so forth. For example, Marie Eisenstein’s survey of Catholics in Indiana (Religion and the Politics of Tolerance, 76–77) shows views that correspond to those on Jim’s trip. Elias Chacour repeats this story elsewhere, in his book Blood Brothers and in interviews, such as Richard A. Kauffman, “Another Man from Galilee: Interview with Elias Chacour,” Christianity Today, March 4, 1996, 33–35. Population statistics in Israel and the Palestinian Authority are controversial so I rely on the most commonly cited numbers. For a breakdown of contemporary statistics, see Tsimhoni, “Israel and the Territories.” All sources agree that the Christian Palestinian population has dwindled over the last century or so. According to the British Mandate’s Survey of Palestine, Christians accounted for slightly less than 10 percent of the settled population until 1946. Cited in McCarthy, The Population of Palestine, 37. For example, Witness for Peace, Christian Peacemaker Teams, and Churches for Middle East Peace; Slessarev-Jamir, Prophetic Activism, 4–7, 14, 182–87. On the post-1967 shift among liberal Protestants regarding support for Palestinians, see Carenen, The Fervent Embrace, 189–211. O’Mahony, “Rome to Jerusalem,” 128; McGarry, “Introduction,” 39. Chinnici, Living Stones, xix–xxi. This timeline comes from my surveys of U.S. Catholic media. According to Palestinian tour professionals, U.S. pilgrims began to use the term “living stones” regularly in about 1995. Jack Wintz, “Caring for the Holy Land,” Columbia, December 2004, 14–15; O’Mahony, “Rome and Jerusalem,” 120. Palestinian Christian intellectuals concur. For example, O’Mahony quotes sociologist Bernard Sabella, the executive secretary of the Middle East Council of Churches. The scholarship on Living Stone tours includes Feldman, “Abraham the Settler, Jesus the Refugee”; and Belhassen and Ebel, “Tourism, Faith, and Politics.” Anglican priest Stephen Sizer also conducts and writes about such tours. I refer to anthropologist Janet Carsten’s notion of “relatedness,” which she uses instead of earlier kinship models based on blood ties. However, whereas Carsten describes kin-like reciprocal ties within a social network, pilgrims focus on symbolic ties (or “faceless” ties through charitable organizations). Carsten’s work is best represented in Cultures of Relatedness. Ebron, Performing Africa, 17. Father David McBriar, “North Carolina Friars Accompany Pilgrims to Holy Land,” HNP Today 45, no. 7 (April 2011), http://www.vocation.org/publications/ hnp_today_view.cfm?iid=172&aid=3625, accessed May 10, 2012. Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory, 40, 190. Ken, post-trip interview with the author, May 2, 2012.

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3. For Connie, the distinction is a Catholic one between “lapsed” and “renewed.”

On evangelicals, see Griffith, God’s Daughters, 18–19, 103–6. 4. Liz Grinder, interview with the author, January 24, 2009; Franklin Graham,

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

letter to author, June 8, 2009; answers provided by Donna Lee Toney, Graham’s personal secretary. Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture; van Gennep, The Rites of Passage. Frey, “Stories of Return,” 96. Turner, “Death and the Dead in the Pilgrimage Process,” 37; Morinis, “Introduction,” 27; Dubisch and Winkleman, Pilgrimage and Healing; Ozorak, “The View from the Edge,” 63. For analogous debates in the literature on “meaningful travel,” see Kelner, Tours That Bind, 188–89. Bowman, “Christian Ideology and the Image of a Holy Land,” 113. Deanna, interview with the author, November 3, 2008. Frey, “Stories of Return,” 97–98, 101–3. This difference may reflect the centrality of the Holy Land in the Christian imagination or the older average age of Holy Land pilgrims. I differ here from Notermans, “The Power of the Less Powerful,” 192, which focuses on the “new and powerful actions” that result. Maurice Bloch quoted in Csordas, “Genre, Motive and Metaphor,” 463. Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture, 10; Csordas, “Genre, Motive and Metaphor,” 459. Basu, Highland Homecomings, xi, my italics. Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture, 25, 35. Coleman and Eade, “Introduction: Reframing Pilgrimage,” 17; Frey, Pilgrim Stories, 202–3. Another key metaphor in Christian travel relates to the “journey of life” (or life as a “pilgrimage”). Walter, “War Grave Pilgrimage,” 75, 79; Ella, post-trip interview with the author, January 24, 2009. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, 160–61, 184. The Vineyard movement, which began in California in the 1970s, is an association with over 1,000 member churches. It is neocharismatic, characterized by a blend of Pentecostal and neo-evangelical elements. Stewart, On Longing, 137. Coleman, “When Silence Isn’t Golden,” 58. As per Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture, this is a “solid” metaphor (and the name of the gate is a linguistic metaphor). On biblical literalism and material metaphor, see Coleman, “When Silence Isn’t Golden,” 46. Note that although many guides tell this story, there is no evidence that it is true. Robert R. Yandle, “Why Go to the Holy Land?” Church Administration, January 1999, 38. Kuhn, Family Secrets, 127; Wachtel, “Introduction,” 1–18. Scholars of U.S. Christianity are also familiar with this notion from their research on conversion narratives. See, for example, Stromberg, Language and Self-Transformation, 15.

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47. Ammerman, “Golden Rule Christianity,” 204. 48. Ella, pre-trip interview with the author, October 8, 2008; Miller, A Theory of

Shopping, 104. 49. McGreevey, Parish Boundaries, 13; Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 73–109. 50. Janine, post-trip interview with the author, April 18, 2010; Cuneo, Smoke of

Satan, 149–50. 51. John Coleman, “Young Adults: A Look at Demographics.” Commonweal, Sep-

tember 14, 1990, 483–90. 52. Thomas, Entangled Objects, 21–23. 53. Mauss, The Gift, 37–39. 54. Jaffe, “Packaged Sentiments,” 116. 55. This is similar to the “launchers” described in Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of

Power, 187. 56. Stewart, On Longing, 150. 57. Carrier, Gifts and Commodities, 146. 58. Hecht, “Home Sweet Home,” 143. 59. Developed for Father Patrick Peyton’s Family Rosary Crusade in the 1940s, this

60.

61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

slogan is now ubiquitous in the United States. Large-scale models of the praying hands can be seen at Oral Roberts University (Tulsa, OK) and in Webb City, MO. Franklin, Tourism: An Introduction, 2; Basu, Highland Homecomings, 228; Morgan and Pritchard, “On Souvenirs and Metonymy,” 31. There are substantial critiques of souvenirs. MacCannell associates them with the spurious (while also critiquing intellectual cultural critics) in The Tourist, 147–51. See also Gordon, “The Souvenir”; and Graburn, “Tourism: The Sacred Journey.” Hurdley, “Dismantling Mantelpieces,” 717–33. McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 28, 60–62; McDannell, Material Christianity, 97–101. On how consumption and display relate to identity-making, see Stewart, On Longing; Miller, Material Culture; and Miller, Home Possessions. This conversation relies heavily on Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. By the 1920s, Victorian sentimental decorating was no longer considered tasteful; McDannell, Material Christianity, 99–100. Ironically, cultural critics say much the same thing. Susan Sontag accused the photo-snapping tourist of “refusing experience”; Sontag, On Photography, 9–10. Dale, post-trip interview with the author, May 12, 2012. Stewart, On Longing, 48–49; Zuromskis, “On Snapshot Photography,” 49–62; Langford, Suspended Conversations, 87. Zuromskis, “On Snapshot Photography,” 53. Bourdieu, Photography; Sontag, On Photography, 42; MacCannell, The Tourist, 147. Conversely, these scholars also drew on Sontag’s understanding of the photographer as agent. See, for example, Kuhn, Family Secrets. Zuromskis, “On Snapshot Photography,” 58.

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the United States. I do not mean to suggest that all Catholics understand the trip in precisely these terms. Preston, “The Rediscovery of America: Pilgrimage in the Promised Land,” 17; Kaelber, “Place and Pilgrimage, Real and Unreal,” 282–89. Complementary discussions include Timothy and Olsen, “Tourism and Religious Journeys,” 12–14; Raj and Morpeth, “Introduction,” 1–14; Raj, “Case Study 1: The Festival of Sacrifice and Travellers to the City of Heaven (Makkah)”; MacCannell, The Tourist, 43. Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs, 109–74. Formative work includes Moore, Selling God; Schmidt, Consumer Rites; and, more recently, Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart. Also pertinent are recent ethnographies, including Elisha, Moral Ambition. Porterfield, The Transformation of American Religion, 13. Kaufman, Consuming Visions, 64. Kaufman notes something similar vis-à-vis theology. Elisha, Moral Ambition, 123. Carrier, Gifts and Commodities, 146. Schmidt, Consumer Rites, 11.

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index

Advertisements, 43, 46, 197. See also Slogans Aesthetics, 17–18, 78, 90–91, 98; at home, 183; interfaith relations, 18, 129, 134–37, 159, 204, 230n27, 231n30 Aging, 65–68, 75, 115, 170, 192, 205, 222n35; lifecycle transitions, 13, 66–67, 201, 205, 222n37. See also Death; Illness; Retirement Air travel, 6, 45–46, 210n13 Al-Aqsa Mosque, 87 Angels, 16; decorative statues, 182, 184–45; group as, 170, 174–75; visions of, 96–97 Anti-Catholicism, 33, 131–33, 86–87, 215n12 Anti-evangelicalism, 130–31 Apostles, 16, 45–46, 82, 84, 104, 113, 119 Apocalypse: See Millennialism Arab Christians, 40, 48, 132, 149–151; as genetically descended from early Christians, 151. See also Palestinians Architecture, 91, 134–36 Army: Israeli, 148; U.S., 50, 149, 165 Authenticity: of Christian practice, 18, 113, 152; critique of tourism, 212n28; in guide’s rhetoric, 80, 84, 89–90, 111, 120; of Holy Land places, 16–17, 77, 79, 84, 90, 94, 98, 203, 218n61; of souvenirs, 177. See also Disneyization Axis mundi, 200 Baptism, 130, 162, 168–69, 175, 179, 182, 230n16. See also Jordan River Baptist Church, 27, 29, 53, 61, 195, 206 Bargaining, 123–25. See also Markets Begin, Menachem, 47 Bethlehem, 21, 24, 60, 92, 137, 141, 144 Bible: in advertising, 46; atlases, 32–33; and Catholics, 99–105, 120–21, 203,

227n9; “coming alive,” 26, 86, 95–96, 164–67, 197; illustrations, 29, 32; inerrancy of (literalism), 25, 31–32, 38–39, 144, 167–68, 200; reading, 18, 29, 51–52, 61, 73, 83, 164–66, 90, 97, 106, 108, 166, 194; and the Stations of the Cross (“the scriptural way of the cross”), 115–16; study groups, 58, 101–3, 106–7, 166, 205; uniting all Christians, 56, 79; used by guides and pastor-leaders, 79, 81, 125–26, 149, 152–53, 161, 197; Vigil (Catholic), 103; Vulgate, 105–6 Biblical archeology, 166, 203, 214n14; as science, 33; on tour, 89–90, 98 Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, 46–47, 53, 95, 162 Body of Christ, 60, 100, 151, 154. See also Global position Bourdieu, Pierre 10, 17, 188, 230n18 Bowman, Glenn, 91, 117, 163 British “mandate,” 21 Bush, George W., 154 Camino de Santiago, 162–63, 190–91 Capernaum, 77, 93 Caregiver (female), 15, 67–69, 71, 99, 112, 144, 160, 169, 198, 201; ambivalence about, 71–72, 172. See also Helping behaviors Catholic Biblical Association, 103 Catholic Christian Doctrine (CCD), 160 Certeau, Michel de, 89, 119, 229n47 Charismatic Christianity, 57, 100, 104, 107–8, 111, 164, 166. See also Pentecostalism Charity, 126–27, 173 Chautauqua, 32, 210n10 Chacour, Elias, 149, 153–54

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Greatest Story Ever Told (film), 42– 43 Group dynamics, 12–13, 56, 57–60, 95, 98, 113–14, 117–119, 130–31, 147, 172–73; choosing a group, 53, 60–61; memories upon return, 170–75; with other groups, 123–24, 132, 137. See also Golden Rule Christianity; Helping behaviors Guides, 3, 33, 47–50, 158, 167; Arab, 47, 148, 219n67; Israeli licensing, 47–48, 219n68; Messianic Jewish, 48, 155–57; Muslims, 48–49; pastor/ priest guides, 53–54, 74, 86, 97, 113; performing Jewishness, 157; pilgrims’ ambivalence about, 48–50, 81, 89, 113, 147–48; and political ideologies, 49, 140–41, 147–48, 158; in scholarship, 27, 164, 202, 220n73; strategies of guiding, 82, 86–89, 92, 98, 125–26, 140 Harding, Susan, 23 Hayford, Jack, 21, 97, 156 Healing, 9, 16, 57, 64, 67–68, 70–71, 80–81, 90, 111–14, 163, 169–70, 213n54. See also Prayer Health and wealth theology, 62 Heaven, 16, 38, 49, 64–67, 69–70, 93, 95, 139, 193 Helping behaviors, 65, 110, 171, 236n26, 236n27; imitating Jesus, 171–72. See also Group dynamics Heritage tourism, 50, 72, 146, 173, 221n22. See also Roots Hollywood, 42–43, 138 Holocaust, 37–38, 46, 152–53, 155 Holy Sepulchre, 35–36, 77–78, 87, 90, 94, 111, 120, 215n18, 223n10; Catholic critique of, 127–29; Protestant critique of, 33, 86, 95–96, 131–32; violence or disputes at, 77, 90, 132 Holy Spirit, 84, 100, 107–8

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tions; Second Vatican Council Nursing home, 28, 65–66. See also Illness Obenzinger, Hilton, 29, 31 Olive: oil, 126–27; olive-wood souvenirs, 1, 122–23, 177, 180, 182–87 Orthodox (Eastern), 25, 36, 86, 90, 95, 100, 104, 127–29, 137–38, 159, 163; Arab Christians, 40, 47, 150–51; churches, 33, 77, 87, 92, 122, 134; priests, 78, 128. See also Interfaith relations Orthodox Jews, as symbols, 43, 144 Ottoman Empire, 21, 47, 77, 223n10 Pain, 16, 68, 104, 170–71, 202 Palestine: before 1948, 7, 21, 25, 29, 32; Palestinian Authority, 21, 28, 143 Palestinians, 42, 45, 47, 117, 140–42, 149, 153–54; imagined as biblical Jews, 43–46, 86, 125–26; as “Indians,” 42; prejudice against, 144–45; “pro-Palestinian” pilgrims, 24, 26, 58, 114, 117, 126–27, 147–53, 159; tour guides, 49, 126, 147–49; vendors, 124–25. See also Arab Christians; Liberation theology Panorama, 81, 84–89, 138, 203 Papal pilgrimages, 38, 128, 150, 218n51 Parochial school, 106 Pastors, 6, 167, 189; as tour leaders, 3, 48, 53–57, 60–61, 74, 189 Patriotism (American), 58, 92 Penitence, 16, 171 Pentecostalism, 69, 100, 213n54. See also Charismatic Christianity Philosemitism, 23, 41, 145–46, 203 Photographs, 10, 30, 32–33, 35, 43, 51, 94, 125, 161, 174, 180–83; photo albums, 185–88; and visions, 96–97, 168–69 Pluralism, 5, 118–19, 139, 199–200, 231n39. See also Interfaith relations Politics, 3, 25–26, 47, 49, 54, 57, 104, 118, 122, 143–55, 159, 202 Pope, 36–38, 99, 115, 128, 150

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van Gennep, Arnold, 10, 162 Vatican, 33, 47, 109, 150; and Israel, 36–37, 216n24; See also Second Vatican Council Vendors, 86, 117, 124–27, 132, 154, 176 Via Dolorosa, 16, 114–20, 123, 125 Victimhood, 151–53 Violence, 33, 39, 149, 151–52. See also Terrorism Visions, 95–97, 107, 165 Visualization techniques, 165–66 Volunteerism, 160, 162–63 Vow, 16 Wailing Wall. See Kotel Walking, 22, 32, 61, 87–89, 117–19, 170–71, 175, 229n47 Weber, Max, 122–23 Western United States, Holy Land comparisons to, 41–43 Wheaton College, 6 Witness. See Missions Wuthnow, Robert, 56, 58, 146 Yosemite National Park, 142

“Ugly Americans,” 138 Unity. See Global position Urry, John, 88, 210n7

Zionism: Christian, 3, 26, 41, 143–45, 148, 153, 202–3, 216n28; Jewish, 36, 47

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About the Author

Hillary Kaell is Assistant Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal. She completed her doctorate in American Studies at Harvard University in 2011.

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