Jet Age Crossings: The Surprising Links Forged through American Holy Land Tourism

International tourism is a fundamental component of the global flows that characterize the modern and late capitalist period. Today nearly one billion tourists travel worldwide each year (Wuthnow, 2009: 63), a significant proportion for religious reasons. This paper looks at the growth of one influential sector of this market – the Holy Land pilgrimage industry geared towards American Christians. Scholarship offers a robust portrait of late-nineteenth century Protestant travel in the Gilded Age (Vogel, 1993; Greenberg, 1994; Obenzinger, 1999); a few chapters in larger volumes have also examined the growth of late-nineteenth century Catholic trips (Klatzker in Sarna and Lederhendler, 2002). Two assumptions prevail: that twentieth-century mass-market tourism grew out of these antecedents and that American Protestants and Catholics developed and maintained entirely separate industries, a belief perpetuated by American and Israeli tour operators promoting market specialization.

Focusing on the 1920s-1960s, this paper argues that Holy Land mass tourism – which today accounts for hundreds of thousands of individual American trips abroad each year – did not arise primarily from nineteenth-century models. It grew out of new, mid-century trends towards leisure vacationing, Catholic assimilation, and Christian ecumenism. Behind the scenes it fostered some surprising partnerships: Catholic Franciscans and conservative evangelicals; Greek Orthodox industry professionals and Midwestern fundamentalists; Jews, Arabs and American Christians. I examine these linkages and some of the reasons they developed, focusing on four primary factors: the professionalization of the tour industry in the US and abroad; new Israeli laws regulating guiding licences and training; the development of the nascent ecumenical movement (Shultz, 2011); and the rise of para-denominationalism, especially as it affected the growth of religious leisure practices like evangelical summer camps and short-term mission vacations (Wuthnow, 1995; Carpenter in Noll and Eskridge, 2000).