Pilgrimage as Social Process in Roman Catholic and Protestant Culture

Abstract

Abstract In The Strict sense pilgrimage does not exist in Protestant society or culture. One of the “abuses” renounced by the Reformers at the time of the Protestant Reformation was that of pilgrimage, which was said to support the theology of salvation by works, one that the Protestant theologians deplored. If one looks more closely, however, at how Protestant individuals and families move across the landscape of the Southern United States and the south of Scotland both strongholds of Reformed Christianity one finds that a pattern of travel to sacred places in honor of revered saints and ancestors does exist. This is, after all, the classical Oxford English Dictionary definition of a pilgrim: “one who journeys to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion.” Yet in Protestant culture these journeys are not so defined; they are certainly not called pilgrimages by their devout participants. I intend to explore in this chapter why this is true. Pilgrimage does, in fact, exist in Protestantism, and it is an important symbolic statement for its adherents.1 The pilgrimage centers to which I refer in the travel pattern of devout Protestants are connected not with a salvation by works or with the propitiation of saints or intercessors, but with a salvation based on faith alone, accompanied by good works because of the person’ s having been saved by the grace of God.