Evangelical Tours to the Holy Land: A Study on the Theopolitics of Christian Pilgrimages

175 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007.The fieldwork upon which all three studies that construct the body of this dissertation are based was conducted in East-Central Illinois, where an evangelical couple organizes trips to Israel as part of a larger set of religious activities they coordinate as managers of an evangelical radio station. By inductively examining the tours from Illinois, the dissertation attempts to contribute to tourism scholarship by placing empirical data in conversation with the pilgrimage and religious tourism literature and begin to evaluate the usefulness of the current epistemological shift in the way pilgrimage is studied and conceptualized as it occurs "on the ground." Seeking to, therefore, engage pilgrimage literature from a wider perspective by considering political, cultural and behavioral interrelated aspects. Given the central role of Israel in the evangelical worldview, it examines the relationship between theology and the state of Israel as a tourism destination. Additionally, by considering pilgrimage as a form of tourism, this dissertation strives to initiate a more direct discussion than has previously occurred in the literature regarding the utility of the concepts of authenticity for explaining tourists' experiences.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD