Pilgrimage in the jet age: the development of the American evangelical Holy Land travel industry, 1948–1978

Abstract

The period from 1948 to 1978 was the key transitional moment that brought modern, mass tourism to the Holy Land. It also saw the rise of American tourism as the primary market segment in the area. Yet the period remains woefully understudied, lost amidst ample scholarly work about Holy Land travel in earlier and later periods. This article examines the development of the American evangelical Holy Land travel industry in this period. It argues that scholars should conceive of the middle-class Christian leisure industry in ways that correspond to how historian Lisa McGirr has described the rise of evangelical politics in the same period: a series of overlapping grassroots networks. Two major points about these networks are highlighted. First, Catholic companies, which have remained obscured in tourism history literature, actually provided the first models in this homegrown industry. Second, fledgling evangelical companies positioned themselves as insiders in faith communities by adapting models from the Christians they served, such as the pastor–lay relationship and the trend toward non-denominationalism in the 1970s.

Keywords:

• advertising
• community
• industry
• pilgrimage
• religion

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Yaniv Belhassen for providing the statistical data on the number of yearly pilgrims in Israel.

Notes

1. Jerusalem, Galilee, Nazareth, and Bethlehem have always been defined as the ‘Holy Land.’ More peripheral places are included based on politics. For American evangelicals, the Holy Land primarily means Israel, but can include places in Egypt (Sinai) and Jordan (Mount Nebo). Since 1948, this definition has depended on which areas are open to USA tourism and allow border crossings to/from Israel or major airports. For example, in the late-1960s American imagined the ‘Holy Land’ as including areas in Lebanon and Syria, which are now considered unsafe and have visa restrictions.

2. I use the term ‘evangelical’ loosely to mean proselytizing Christians who are generally socially and often politically ‘conservative,’ but do not disassociate themselves from mainstream society. Evangelicals consider the bible inerrant and central. For a more robust definition, see Martin E. Marty, ed. Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (1993), intro; Mark Shibley, Resurgent Evangelicalism in the United States (1996) 1–6. The pilgrimage industry is defined here as companies engaged primarily (or entirely) in running Christian pilgrimages – group trips focused on ‘walking where Jesus walked.’

3. Given the localized and pan-denominational nature of the pilgrimage industry, there is little material in archives. This article is therefore based upon archival sources where possible and 60 narrative interviews. Subjects were chosen after a systematic review of denominational magazines and the New York Times in the 1940–1970s. I contacted as many of the companies and former trip organizers as I could find. Some interviewees, such as Hani Abu Dayyeh, were recommended to me by a number of sources as major figures in the industry. Sixty interviews were completed between 2007 and 2009.

4. It is beyond the scope of this article to systematically evaluate the reasons that Jordan never successfully caught on as the ‘Holy Land’ in the USA imagination. There are likely a few factors: the significance of the Jews and the Jewish testament in Christian theology, the fact that Jordan's loss of the Holy Land sites coincided with the development of modern tourism, the persistent image amongst Americans that Holy Land Arabs lived in an apolitical, biblical pastoral (For example, see Madden, 1961).

5. End Times theology in this incarnation is foreign to Jewish theology and, moreover, states that Jesus will return and Jews who do not convert to Christianity will perish with the anti-Christ. For more see Ariel, 2002; Weber, 2004.