Creating Ritual through Narrative, Place and Performance in Evangelical Protestant Pilgrimage in the Holy Land

Abstract

Evangelical Protestant pilgrims come to the Holy Land to be able to feel God's presence in the Land by feeling the presence of Christ in themselves. Their understanding of the Land as the living Word of God, their capacity for embodied spiritual experience, and their rejection of traditional Christian rites and places of worship – together with the theatrical potential of the Bible – open the Evangelical Protestant pilgrims to ritual experimentation in alternative places. I use the case of an organized pilgrimage group from the American Midwest to discuss how the pastor and the tour guide, each from their different but overlapping perspectives, create a context in which Jesus is encouraged to enter the pilgrims through the performance of the biblical battle between David and Goliath in a valley southwest of Jerusalem.