Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage

North American Religions Series

by Hillary Kaell

Since
the 1950s, millions of American Christians have traveled to the Holy Land to
visit places in Israel and the Palestinian territories associated with Jesus’s life
and death. Why do these pilgrims choose to journey
halfway around the world? How do
they react to what they encounter, and how do
they understand the trip upon return? This book places the
answers to these questions into the context of broad historical trends, analyzing how
the growth of mass-market evangelical and Catholic pilgrimage
relates to changes in American Christian
theology and culture over the last sixty years,
including shifts in Jewish-Christian relations, the growth of small group spirituality, and the development of a Christian
leisure industry.

Drawing on five years
of research with pilgrims before, during and after their trips, Walking Where Jesus Walked offers a lived religion approach that
explores the trip’s hybrid nature for pilgrims both ordinary—tied
to their everyday role as the family’s ritual specialists, and
extraordinary—since they leave home in a dramatic way, often for the first
time. Their experiences illuminate key tensions in contemporary US Christianity
between material evidence and transcendent divinity, commoditization and
religious authority, domestic relationships and global experience.

Hillary Kaell crafts the first in-depth study of the
cultural and religious significance of American Holy Land pilgrimage after
1948. The result sheds light on how Christian pilgrims, especially women, make
sense of their experience in Israel-Palestine, offering an important complement
to top-down approaches in studies of Christian Zionism and foreign policy.

Genres: Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published June 6, 2014

Reviews

[Mimi · Rating 4 out of 5]

2024 - This was my second read - as a morning read this time. I had read it in preparation for a delayed Holy Land trip in 2020 and now after returning. The first takeaway is that everyone thinks we Orthodox are weird. The second one is my experience was very stereotypical, apparently. Just remember you are unique, just like everyone else.

[Thomas Bremer]

Hillary Kaell’s book Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage (New York University Press, 2014) presents a detailed ethnographic account of contemporary American Christians traveling on “pilgrimage” to Israel and the Palestinian Territories (what she calls the “Holy Land” in keeping with her informants’ understandings). Many of them go, she explains, “as a self-conscious return to the ‘source’ of their faith, physically and imaginatively” (3). Kaell traveled with them, and she offers an intimate portrait of the pilgrims’ experiences as they retrace what they regard as the footsteps of their divine history.

Kaell’s work does not focus exclusively on Protestants; unlike most other studies of American Christians traveling to the Holy Land, her book includes the experiences of Roman Catholic pilgrims as well. Not only do different Christians have different narratives and therefore different experiences of the Holy Land, Kaell also draws attention to instances of direct contact between them; the Holy Land, she points out, “is the one place where American Catholics and Protestants encounter each other at worship in religious sites that both claim are equally theirs” (7).

In recounting the experiences of American Christians traveling to the Holy Land, Kaell highlights three broad themes that her research makes apparent: “the intersection of religious pilgrimage and commercial leisure, the interplay between global travel and relationships at home, and the dynamic tension between transcendent divinity and material evidence” (4). In elucidating these themes, a “lived religion” orientation takes readers into the experiences and reflections of the travelers, from their expectations and motivations for traveling to the Holy Land, to their experiences walking in places where Jesus presumably had once walked, and then their reflections on the experiences afterward once they return home. Along the way, the analysis considers how contemporary Christian culture in America is inextricably tied to commercial considerations in ways that are religiously productive; the evidence here undermines the false dichotomy of pilgrim and tourist for American Christians on Holy Land tours. At the same time, it addresses several other dualities that are deeply embedded in contemporary American Christian culture: home and away, the transcendent and the material, religion and commerce. Kaell’s book demonstrates that tensions produced in these paired oppositions are in fact inherent in much of Christian experience in the contemporary world.

In sum, Kaell’s account of Holy Land pilgrims offers readers an expanded lens on Americans’ engagement with Christian modernity through global travel practices. It contributes to an expanding literature that interrogates scholarly assumptions about religion, nation, modernity, and commerce.