Stephanie Stidham RogersInventing the Holy Land: American Protestant Pilgrimage to Palestine, 1865–1941. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books. 2011. Pp. x, 163. $60.00

Extract

Anyone who knows American evangelicalism from the inside is familiar with the Holy Land pilgrimage. Often organized by a local pastor, the tour involves visiting holy sites in Israel—“walking where Jesus walked,” as it were. During their trip the pastor and/or other tour guides connect the sites they are visiting with the appropriate Scripture passages, the focus of the trip being the biblical past and the prophetic future (and not the contemporary political and religious situation). On their return, the happy pilgrims report on their Holy Land experiences to those who were left behind, often in a Sunday evening slide show replete with testimonials.

Of course, these pilgrimages have a history. Stephanie Stidham Rogers examines American Protestant tourism in Palestine from 1865, when travel to the Middle East from the United States began to take off, until the onset of World War II. Using thirty‐five pilgrimage narratives as the basis of her study—and it would have been helpful to have a separate and annotated bibliographical section for these narratives—Rogers discusses how American Protestant visitors were troubled by the poverty and filth, dismayed by the ubiquity of Catholic and Orthodox shrines, and outraged by the role of Muslims in administering Christian holy sites. In response these pilgrims worked “to create a Holy Land that was more biblical, or more Protestant” (p. 4). By the end of the nineteenth century this vision of biblical Palestine occupied an important place in American Protestantism, with the frequent inclusion of Holy Land maps and photographs of Palestine in Bibles (in contrast with Rogers's book, which contains neither maps nor photographs), and with the emergence of biblical archaeology as a field of study. Most remarkably, American Protestants came to understand this “invented” Holy Land as a “fifth gospel” that gave Protestants “a way to skip centuries of ecclesiastical corruption and excess … to return to the basic, original, and undeniable truths of the Gospel” (p. 32).