Protestant evangelical pilgrimages: hagiography, supernatural influence, and spiritual mapping

ABSTRACT

Christian pilgrimage sites can be separated into three broad categories: Biblical sites (e.g. Jerusalem, Ephesus, Patmos, and other locations where significant events happen in the Biblical narratives); older Catholic and Anglican sites whose importance has been established over a long history of many centuries (e.g. the Vatican, Lourdes, Canterbury); and lastly, newer sites associated with more recently established Protestant denominations and groups such as Methodism, Lutheranism, Pentecostalism, and others. With a shorter history and lacking either the Biblical significance or the political or national dimension of Catholicism and Anglicanism, other Protestant sites can be considered “popular” or “excentric” sites. These construct their significance through strategies relying on evangelical and Pentecostal discourses and meanings, particularly the construction of great spiritual figures who wield supernatural and invisible influence over history and society. These constructions propose a Spiritual Mapping that is superimposed onto historical and political events, creating an alternative significance for touristic purposes. This paper examines two sites for Protestant evangelical pilgrimages, centered on the figures of John Wesley and Rees Howells, that demonstrate this touristic construction of protestant hagiography, supernatural influence, and Spiritual Mapping.

KEYWORDS:

• Protestant evangelical tourism
• protestant hagiography
• supernatural influence;
• Spiritual Mapping
• John Wesley
• Rees Howells

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Robbie B. H. Goh is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore. Recent publications include Protestant Christianity in the Indian Diaspora: Abjected Identities, Evangelical Relations, and Pentecostal Visions (SUNY Press, 2018), Language, Space and Cultural Play: Theorising Affect in the Semiotic Landscape (with Lionel Wee, Cambridge UP, 2020), and articles in Culture and Religion, Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture, Material Religion, and elsewhere.

Notes

1 Thus visitor “Dennis N,” in a comment of 7 September 2018, calls the Wesley Chapel and Museum “an amazing piece of London History,” while “Avery M” in a comment of 14 May 2018 says that the chapel and museum are “recommended even for non-Christians,” and offer “a beautiful portrait of Christianity in early modern England and a worldwide Christian movement inspired by it” (Trip Advisor 2018a). Commercial tour companies and tour-related sites also leverage on the “national” Wesley to market tours, examples of which include Greatdays Travel's “In the Footsteps of John Wesley” 9-day tour of the UK (Greatdays Travel 2018), Tours International's London-Oxford-Bristol “John Wesley Tour” (Tours International 2018), and Tours of Excellence's 8-day “Methodist Tour of England” (Tours of Excellence 2018).

2 The Cornerstone Community Church in Singapore is a large Pentecostal-charismatic church interested in spiritual revivals around the world. Its purchase of the BCW is an instance of Spiritual Mapping, where the Singapore church identified the BCW (in its association with Howells and the Welsh Revival) as a spiritual center appropriate for establishing a global school to train Christians in Pentecostal-style missions.