Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage

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 themselves: 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

1. 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.