Pilgrimage in the jet age: the development of the American evangelical Holy Land travel industry, 1948-1978

The period from 1948 to 1978 was the key transitional moment that brought modern, mass tourism to the Holy Land. It also saw the rise of American tourism as the primary market segment in the area. Yet the period remains woefully understudied, lost amidst ample scholarly work about Holy Land travel in earlier and later periods. This article examines the development of the American evangelical Holy Land travel industry in this period. It argues that scholars should conceive of the middle-class Christian leisure industry in ways that correspond to how historian Lisa McGirr has described the rise of evangelical politics in the same period: a series of overlapping grassroots networks. Two major points about these networks are highlighted. First, Catholic companies, which have remained obscured in tourism history literature, actually provided the first models in this homegrown industry. Second, fledgling evangelical companies positioned themselves as insiders in faith communities by adapting models from the Christians they served, such as the pastor-lay relationship and the trend toward non-denominationalism in the 1970s.