Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage. By Hillary Kaell. New York: NYU Press, 2014. Pp. xiii+269. $28.00 (paper).

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsWalking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage. By Hillary Kaell. New York: NYU Press, 2014. Pp. xiii+269. $28.00 (paper).David WalkerDavid WalkerUniversity of California Santa Barbara Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreHillary Kaell’s ethnographic account of contemporary American evangelical and Catholic tours of the Holy Land is—indeed, like many offerings from NYU’s young North American Religions Series—pitched perfectly for classroom use. To read it is to think about teaching it, which is to say: to consider how best to invite others to think with and alongside Kaell’s accounts of pilgrims thinking with and alongside each other. In this case the payoff is great especially if one brings one’s own footnotes and comparisons to the table.I propose, as a place to begin, attention to a section that is both an exemplum of good writing and a microcosm of Kaell’s overall method and message. In a middle chapter (3 of 6), Kaell presents three “travel snapshots” expressing different stages of travel and aspects of concern for a group—consisting of conservative Baptists, Methodists, and nondenominational Christians, mostly women, mostly from the Carolinas, with an average age of 55—cast here as broadly representative of American evangelical Protestantism. The first snapshot captures Kaell’s pilgrims visiting the Garden Tomb, a Protestant counterpart to the Orthodox- and Catholic-dominated Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The second captures their visits to Catholic sites at the Church of Saint Anne and Mount Carmel, and the third finds them on a large motorboat on the Sea of Galilee, listening to sermons and modern praise music, en route to see the “Jesus boat,” a first-century relic now housed at a shoreline museum. Through Kaell’s narration the reader learns a good deal about Protestant cultures both old and new: about the history of the Garden Tomb, for instance, as well as about contemporary musical aesthetics and the “pattern common to many preachers in the U.S. South” of telling “three stories that were not explicitly linked but when taken together, tell us something about the message [the pastor] wanted us to imbibe” (83), a practice that seems neatly to parallel Kaell’s own three-snapshot narrative device. Most importantly, though, the reader imbibes the main message triangulated by the vignettes: modern pilgrims find innovative ways of navigating tensions between the concept of universally available grace, usually associated with Protestants, and the desire for specifically place-based knowledge, usually associated with Catholics. More specifically, Kaell’s Protestant travelers experienced tensions between pointillist attention (as at Mount Carmel, looking down) and panoramic vision (as at Mount Carmel, looking out) and among concerns about authenticity and antiquity (as embodied by the Jesus boat), the commercial or ritual pollution of otherwise authentic and antique sites (as perceived at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre), and the sensory or intellectual appeal of venues arguably inauthentic and out of place (the Garden Tomb) or definitely anachronistic (the motorized worship boat). That many pilgrims were most enthusiastic about the rightly located but indubitably modern and commercialized experience of motor-boating across the Galilee—“It was the most authentic aspect of the trip for me,” said one woman (84)—speaks both to evangelical concern with locative (vs. literal) divine presence and to a cultivated comfort with the interpenetration of God, mammon, authenticity, and inauthenticity. Kaell argues that scholars have failed to see or study the practices of such pilgrims sufficiently, in any case, and thus to account for such concerns and comforts alike. Scholarly presumptions of Protestant antiritualism and iconoclasm, narrow associations of Protestant interest in the Middle East with premillennialist Jewish restorationism, the tendency to treat Holy Land visits as bounded touristic affairs, a disproportionate attention to the writings and sermons of male tour leaders and pastors, and—to be discussed further below—a preoccupation with the middle, “liminal” stage of pilgrimage have blinded academics to the ways modern Protestant Holy Land pilgrims, many of them women, forge deeply personal and willfully apolitical experiences before, during, and after their journeys.If Kaell’s narrative is concerned partly with blurring boundaries between place and grace, commerce and the sacred for Protestant pilgrims—or, rather, with observing the ways pilgrims themselves uphold such boundaries while traversing them in practice—it works also from the Catholic angle, finding American Catholic pilgrims approximating stereotypically Protestant positions through the formation of Bible-study groups, the dismissal of “premodern” ritual excesses, and the privileging of personal relationships with Christ. In one particularly interesting section, Kaell observes that American Catholic and Protestant travelers forge often an in situ ecumenism through the mutual disavowal of Orthodox aesthetics. The Catholic cohort with whom Kaell traveled consisted mainly of “middle-old” women, albeit this time from the Northeast, whom Kaell again considers representative of a larger religious culture in America. This particular culture is defined both in generational and in epochal terms, though, and indeed this is one of the principal ways in which the author argues for change over time in Holy Land pilgrimage: Kaell’s Catholics and their concerns are products of the Vatican II era, their routes shaped by the selective affirmation and rejection of postconciliar disinterest in ritual, hierarchy, and Marian devotion. “Modern” pilgrimage is elsewhere distinguished from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century forms in terms of technological development, economic change, demographics, and politics: more people from an expanded middle class have time and money to spend on airfare and package tours, themselves increasingly inexpensive and abundant, especially during their middle-old years; and they travel not only with an interest in affirming Christian relationships across time and space but with a post-WWII eye to global community and, more recently, a rising ambivalence about Israeli righteousness and power. What has resulted, per Kaell, is the expansion of (what scholars of nineteenth-century American Protestantism have described as) “Holy Land Mania” to a larger, more mobile, and more diversely religious group—the growth of which has been unmatched by commensurate scholarly attention.Kaell’s main academic conversation partner throughout this book is Victor Turner, whose focus on the “liminal” middle stage of ritual has, she thinks, led other scholars to neglect the pretrip and posttrip stages of pilgrimage and to overestimate pilgrims’ sense of a break between home and away. It is as a corrective to the Turnerian school that Kaell structures her book as she does, spending approximately half of her time and pages—some three of six chapters, not including the introduction and conclusion—attending to the media and histories that informed her subjects’ understandings of the Holy Land (chap. 1), describing their expectations about and motivations for Holy Land pilgrimage (chap. 2), and, then, after tracing their experiences and itineraries abroad (chaps. 3–5), accounting for the ways they remembered and narrated anew their expectations and experiences alike upon returning home (chap. 6). This is fascinating material, and the reader learns much in the final chapter especially about the devotional labor of women ex-pilgrims—whom Kaell, following Susan Starr Sered, considers “ritual experts” (15). Participants’ memories and accounts shifted and narrowed over time in ways both intentional and unintentional, implicit and explicit: some gradually honed in on singular events or objects as representative of the entire trip, while others rewrote narratives of expectation and effect to accommodate experiential nonevents, and while still others downplayed the language of transformation itself in favor of “process” talk. Crucially, though, even as all of these ex-pilgrims filtered and distilled their recollections, archival records, and e-mail chains in certain ways, they also expanded networks of memory and communication in others, for instance, through acts of familial gift giving, story sharing, and an extended sense of home–Holy Land connection.Kaell is no doubt right that an exclusive focus on the liminal, away stage of pilgrimage would have missed much of the story; and her multistage analysis here positively expands scholarly knowledge and appreciation of such trips. However, I find it surprising that Kaell makes no reference to—and finds no footing in—the work of Caroline Walker Bynum, which long ago critiqued Victor Turner’s ritual theory along similar lines for having obfuscated the ritual work of women. Absent also is engagement with such now influential (and arguably now classic) scholars of ritual as Catherine Bell, Jonathan Z. Smith, and Ronald Grimes (to name only three). In addition, although Kaell draws interesting insights from the likes of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, and—to my own great happiness—Wolfgang Schivelbusch respecting photography and panoramic versus pedestrian sensation, her conversation with the most influential modern theorist of tourism, Dean MacCannell, is limited essentially to one footnote. These seem to me missed opportunities. Might not these scholars have inspired additional consideration of the formal and informal economies of religious consumption (Bynum), the ritual efficacy of juxtaposing things familiar and unfamiliar (Smith), the politics of ostensibly apolitical ritualization (Bell), or the ways tour promoters produce seemingly noncommercial backregions in order to satisfy the commercial interests of would-be pilgrims who seek simultaneous connection to and differentiation from things “premodern” (MacCannell)?I for one would be interested in rereading Kaell’s accounts of pilgrims’ visits to the Garden Tomb and the Sea of Galilee alongside MacCannell’s theories of sight sacralization and his diagnoses of the duplicative or mass-reproductive processes by which an “original” is both conceived and, then, considered to have an aura of authenticity worthy of selective, sometimes partial pursuit. If Kaell thinks that these stories have messages entirely other than those suggested by MacCannell—if she rejects his sense of the global, structural, and touristic imperatives that compel both travel and the discourse of differentiation between travel, tourism, and pilgrimage (if not also between “institutional religion” and “lived religion”)—then to my mind she may have the basis of an intervention more substantial and timely than that against Victor Turner. If not, then she has set the stage for a development that is equally crucial and exciting: the integration, that is, of a number of other themes and theories into a field, pilgrimage studies, that has for too long been held separate out of deference either to singular scholars (e.g., according to Kaell’s diagnosis, Victor Turner), emic differentiations (including arguably the distinction between pilgrimage and tourism), or disciplinary boundaries (e.g., medieval studies vs. modern history, or sociology vs. history).Admittedly such dives into additional theories, histories, and historiographies, had they been entertained in the book itself, might have hindered the sense of its easy assignability at the undergraduate level and, thus, its publishability in this NYU series. I personally think that such inquiries have a natural and necessary place in undergraduate and graduate classrooms alike and that a key concern in assignability anywhere is the degree to which one can imagine nourishing them from within a text or through pairing it with others. Thankfully, in this case, the outcome is a happy one for all: Walking Where Jesus Walked is a lively and compelling read in its own right, and, for those interested in creating a kind of in-class or at-home analog to Kaell and her subjects’ own methods of triangular discussion framing, it is also easy to imagine complementary readings. I have suggested a few secondary sources already. Primary source nominations might include accounts from otherwise affiliated groups of Holy Land travelers—Jewish, Muslim, interfaith, atheist, or differently Christian, for instance; American and non-American; avowedly touristic and stridently pilgrimistic; Rick Steves–approved and not—so as to consider the degree to which Kaell’s Catholic and Evangelical travelers’ concerns are characteristic of more or less than American Christianity and Pilgrimage, as the book’s subtitle suggests. Another option would be to introduce accounts of both nineteenth-century and contemporary travel to United States–based Holy Land replicas or substitutes, prompting reflection—in light of Kaell’s descriptions about the increasing ease and desirability of international travel in the mid-twentieth century, for instance, and also about the malleability of “home” and “away” in pilgrim geography—about the persisting appeal of these domestic sites. I could go on, but my point is that this is a book that makes you think, and that will make students think too, about the routes taken and not taken both by pilgrims and scholars over time. Walking Where Jesus Walked is a valuable contribution to the fields of religious studies, American studies, pilgrimage studies, cultural anthropology, and to their various classrooms alike. And I very much look forward to teaching it. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by History of Religions Volume 57, Number 1August 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/692320 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.